Music-technology Used in Special Education Information Center - MUSEIC

Beep

Hello everyone, a community interest company I co-run has recently been awarded a grant to conduct a year of research and development which will culminate in online publication and free dissemination of all the tools we use and/or create at www.museic.org. We are focusing on pervasive, affordable technologies that can be re-appropriated to help musicians (in particular children and young people) with disabilities make music.

Currently we are looking at the Kinect, Wii controllers, RFID readers, mobile phones (using sensor data sent via OSC), microphones (pitch~ to extract pitch data), Joysticks and Tablet computers.

This post is basically an appeal to everyone for suggestions, example patches, ideas, criticisms - anything that can help this project grow. If you have anything that you would like to contribute then please, please help by posting it here. Anything that you think might be able to help a young musicians with special needs or disabilities make music please send it our way!

Thanks.

brendan mccloskey

Hi Barry
A subject close to both my heart and my PhD, if you're interested in the application of Arduino+Max and DIY sensors as accessible/inclusive performance tools then please do PM me.

see my blog for more info:
http://brendan-admi.blogspot.co.uk/

Best
Brendan
(Co. Down)

mzed

I've had good luck with digitizing tablets. eg Wacom tablets: http://www.mikezed.com/portfolio/ten-years-of-tablet-musical-interfaces-at-cnmat/ The support is a little up in the air in Max 6, but they still work.

Also, fzero~ is a reasonable pitch tracker that comes with Max 6.

Beep

Thanks for the replies guys. The tools we are designing have to be as approachable as possible, we want teachers and learning support assistants to be able to find and replicate them.

For these reasons the technologies we are targeting are mass produced (game controllers etc), shouldn't require any soldering, and should be as affordable as possible.