Everyone has a right to music, but how accessible is music-making to the community?

Australians with a disability face significant barriers to making a career from music.

Almost 20% of Australians – that’s 4.5 million people – identify as living with a disability, the overwhelming majority stating the main form as physical.

But in the world of music, only 7% of the 15,400 practising musicians in Australia live with disability.

This unusually low figure is at odds with the fact Australians with disability are more than twice as likely to give money to the arts, and are more likely to acknowledge the positive impacts of the arts – nearly 70% say the arts have a “big” or “very big” impact on their sense of wellbeing and happiness.

Further, 19% of Australians with disability – almost one million people – already play a musical instrument, compared with only 15% of other Australians.

Acoustic instruments have their limitations

Why are Australian musicians with disability so underrepresented in the music industry as practising musicians?

One of the main barriers is the instruments themselves, with nearly all musicians with physical disability settling for a traditional acoustic instrument that may not be ideal for their creative practice.

Acoustic instruments maintain an inherent and unyielding link between movement and sound, and were principally designed to facilitate virtuosic performances by musicians without physical disability.

Now, a new wave of digital “gestural” instruments that use motion sensors give us the opportunity to reimagine and reinvent the connection between human movement and sound in ways that couldn’t be conceived in the design of traditional acoustic instruments.

The slightest physical movement can be converted into loud, thunderous drums, virtual strings can be plucked out of thin air, and the art forms of dance and music-making can become one.

Disability itself, according to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, “results from the interaction between persons with impairments and attitudinal and environmental barriers that hinders their full and effective participation in society.”

Enter the AirSticks

At Monash University, a team of musicians, engineers and disability advocates at the University’s SensiLab have developed AirSticks 2.0.

As the name suggests, the instrument is in its second iteration. The original AirSticks, which I co-invented with computer programmer Mark Havryliv in 2013, relied on off-the-shelf virtual reality (VR) controllers. The controllers were far from ideal for music performance, as they were essentially repurposed plastic gaming controllers wired to a hub.

They did provide us with motion data that allowed the triggering and manipulation of sound through invisible “triggering planes” or by pressing buttons on the controllers.

This led to a very expressive gestural instrument that extended the metaphor of playing an electronic drum kit with trigger pads much further, giving the performer full control over every nuance of the sound; the timing, length and character of the sound could be changed depending on how and where strikes were made.

The original AirSticks were used in hundreds of performances, including the Vivid Sydney festival, TedXSydney and on Triple J’s Like a Version. However, the instrument remained relatively inaccessible to the broader community, with the controllers themselves being commercially discontinued, and the triggering system being difficult to master.

A ground-up rebuild

The AirSticks 2.0 gave SensiLab researchers Sam Trolland, Elliott Wilson, Professor Jon McCormack, Ciaran Frame and myself the opportunity to redesign and build the instrument from the ground up, creating hardware that would allow the instrument to be completely wireless and attachable to drumsticks, forearms or gloves.

Other considerations included low latency (for the overall “delay” between movement and sound generation to be kept to an imperceivable minimum), plug-and-play functionality (to allow data to be immediately accessible for integration within existing digital instruments), and to be fully configurable (giving control over the calibration of the data received for customisation).

But, if an instrument is played only in a lab and no one’s there to hear it, does it really exist?