Description
Emmanouil Dimogerontakis, Dan Overholt, Stefania Serafin · Aalborg University · NIME 2024
An accessible digital instrument that takes the white cane as its starting point. You hold a handle attached to a flexible transparent arm and sweep its tip across a plate studded with raised markers; the sweep is read and turned into sound, while a tablet holds the sound configuration.
What makes it worth keeping here is the premise: the cane is already an instrument of perception, something its users have spent years learning to read a room with. Rather than designing “simple” controls for blind musicians, the work borrows an existing expert skill and asks what it can do musically. Accessibility here is not about lowering a barrier but about which bodies a mapping is written for.
images: Dimogerontakis, Overholt & Serafin, “MusiCane: an Accessible Digital Instrument inspired by the white cane”, NIME 2024 (CC BY 4.0)