Matt Mateus and Adam Sherlock

Spyhop

Opportunities for Designing Accessible Music Technology Curriculum

This presentation will focus on accessibility. Specifically, how do you go about designing a curriculum for music technology for youth that either have an impairment or lack of accessibility to that technology (or both)? 

In this presentation, we will focus on two examples. The first one is an electronic music/beatmaking class that Adam designed for the Schools for the Deaf and Blind. We worked with their school staff to create a program that used Ableton Push’s to help them create beats and songs. It was really successful and we are now in the process of developing more programs for them. 

The second example is working with incarcerated youth. The program that we do is based on audio production (to allow for anonymity) and results in a podcast of stories, songs and spoken word. One of the many challenges with this is that students cannot practice on their own as all of the gear is considered contraband.

We would like to present this in a way that would encourage other educators to think about creative ways in which they can develop and bring their programming to people that may have specific challenges.