Emergence of a context for musicking with children with ASD

This project is a long-term collaboration with two non-profit organization and children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) design a social context that support the development of an inclusive musicking context, where the Accessible Digital Musical Instruments (ADMIs) developed and used were no longer at the center of our solutions, and became one element among others in this ecosystem.

In the recent years, there has been a growing interest in designing musical instruments and interfaces that would bring musicking to people with health conditions and impairments [1], where musicking is defined as the process through which one take part in music performance, whether by performing, listening, dancing, practicing or rehearsing [2]. This area of research, called Accessible Digital Musical Instrument (ADMI), promotes the accessibility of musical control interfaces used in electronic music, inclusive music practices and music therapy [1]. The aim is both to facilitate musical expression among these audiences and to use musical performance as a form of care.

In order to meet these objectives, recent studies have highlighted the value of participatory approaches, in which people with disabilities are involved in the creation of musical instruments so that these instruments incorporate their specific characteristics. Their extension to the collective case remains a challenge.

Participatory and inclusive design approaches to ADMI are motivated by the social model of disability[1, 3, 4 ], which views disability in terms of factors external to the individual and non-inclusive social attitudes that create barriers for people with disabilities. The social model of disability was proposed in response to criticism of the medical model of disability, which sees disability as an individual matter, rather than a contextual or systemic one. In this case, disability is seen as the result of some clinically observable physiological impairment, that would require a appropriate "treatment" [5,6]. The social model of disability aims to propose to adapt the context and participation in ADMI design aims to overcome these barriers by enabling people with disabilities to influence design decisions.

Without explicitly drawing on these theories, the Disability Art movement [7], which emerged in the 1970s, set out to challenge, in its various practices, the negative view of disability as deviance from a certain normality and adopt a social model of disability to highlight social, political and economical obstacles that disabled people face [8]. This movement promote an alternative disability culture, uplifts and affirms the positive aspects of a disabled identity [9]. Thus disabled artists questioned ableist narratives, sought new imaginaries, alternative values, and claimed a disability culture that is something other than what is excluded. In line with the political conceptions of disability that have emerged from the Disability Arts, the association with which the issues explicited above has been explored through a long-term collaboration, called Brutpop, develops alternative musical practices with disabled people. In this practices that we call Brut music, the technology and the ADMIs developed are rather seen as as one of the components enabling access to musical practice without expertise and embedded in a specific context. We believe that Brut music represents a valuable practice for designing musicking contexts tailored to specific situations. This approach leverages sonic outputs derived directly from the environment, bypassing the need for traditional theoretical musical knowledge.

In this article, we thus seek to explore this idea by first studying how interaction designs for musical expression, dedicated to children and young adults with ASD, can be shaped through the co-agency of the social contexts, the different actors (researchers, caregivers, children), and the technology involved.

Secondly, we study how the adoption of a research-action methodology and the development of Brut music practices can potentially help to design a social context that support the development of an inclusive musicking ecosystem.

This paper presents through a participatory action research project, a long-term and on-going collaboration with two non-profit organizations and non-verbal children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) in order to explore together through different forms of Brut music practices. This study engages users "in the wild" context [10], where the practice paradigm is characterised by activities in situ, involving people and artefacts as part of their daily practices and organisational routines. In our project, the interfaces developed and used were no longer at the center of our solutions, and became one element among others in this relational mesh.

We took a broader view to seek to set up a space where experiences of musical expression could emerge, in an attempt to highlight guidelines or socio-material design recommendations that could benefit in other socio-cultural environments and more widely to research into ADMIs.