Making Electronic Music Inclusive: A Virtual Studio for Visually Impaired Composers

Dr Butch Rovan, Brown University, USA

​Over the past decades, electronic tools have vastly expanded the opportunities for creative musical expression. Modern composers have benefited from this development, with access to ever more powerful and user-friendly technologies. And yet those technologies are not equally accessible to all. The ubiquity of low-contrast visual interfaces, cascading menus, and graphical patching paradigms make most tools for electronic music composition useless for the visually impaired. Most importantly, currently available off-the-shelf interfaces typically feature symmetrical and condensed layouts of controls that make it difficult for the non-sighted user to navigate. My Asymmetrical Media Interface (AMI) seeks to address this challenge.

This paper describes the Asymmetrical Media Interface (AMI) project: an original software/hardware system with a custom user interface that allows visually impaired composers to create interactive electronic music. Its most striking feature is its hardware interface with an asymmetrical layout of controls. The controls are divided into distinct regions, each with their own topology and function, to aid navigation and memory. All controls provide voice feedback, reporting to the user what is being adjusted and at what value.

AMI is powered by an internal microcontroller and custom software running on Mac or PC. The computer software features real-time audio processing that allows the user to manipulate both recorded and live audio through digital signal processing chains. All settings can be stored and recalled later for performance.

The AMI project takes its cue from the growing field known as Universal Design, in order to create a music composition interface that is accessible to all. Universal Design includes seven principles: equitable use; flexible use; simple and intuitive use; perceptible information (e.g., tactile feedback, audio feedback, etc.); tolerance for error; low physical effort; and appropriate space for use. With all of these in mind, AMI addresses the inequity of currently available composition tools by:
• Allowing visually impaired composers access to tools that sighted peers use daily
• Fostering new creative work by visually impaired composers in the field of electronic music

This paper will describe the research, programming, fabrication, and testing phases that led to the device that has now been used in concert and named one of Brown University’s top three innovations for 2024. I will pair the paper presentation with a brief demonstration of the device.