Forming a band using accessible music technology

Here I want to look back on a collaborative project I was involved with, where young people with learning disabilities formed a band using accessible music technology.  

The project was a collaboration between Heart n Soul’s SoundLab and Do Your Own Thing.

• SoundLab is a long term project around accessibility and music technology - looking at what’s available, what’s accessible and working with technologists and tech companies to continually improve awareness around accessibility.
• Do Your Own Thing is Heart n Soul’s creative arts project for Young People, involving music, djing, drama, art and video.

Through SoundLab a concept we called The Pop-Up Band was formulated - a modular, ever changing structure that could create an instant, accessible platform for people to make music with others no matter age, ability or understanding. You can read more about it here.

The idea behind this project was to use the structure of the Pop-Up Band to form an actual band that could perform their own songs using the same set-up. One of the challenges we found looking at accessible technology was finding a balance between something being simple and easy to understand but that wasn’t limiting once you had mastered it. This is often a key critiscm of accessible tech and we were hoping to prove that progess doesn’t always mean overcomplication! The hope was that through using the instant accessible nature of the Pop-Up Band there was still scope to improve, personalise and develop your skills and  express what you wanted to express - it wasn’t just locked in to one form with no progression.  

The one requirement and challenge was that whatever set-up was settled on, after the performance the musicians would be able to turn the equipment round and invite the audience to play and create their own music.

The collaboration happened with the young people that come to Do Your Own Thing because there were a lot of people interested in, and already using, music technology, especially mobile. They also had many recordings they had made, for example a song called OMG Cola! [Read more about that here] that could be used as source material making it possible for them to remix their own songs and their own playing rather than using stock samples.

There were several rehearsals that happened, where songs and samples were edited and selected and the band made choices about what equipment to use. As a way to utilise the nature of the equipment the band created loose structures to improvise around, which they were very comfortable in doing. We were looking to the technology to be a supporting element for the musicians, as an invisible helping hand on stage with them - a great way for myself as a music facilitator to not to be on stage!

The culmination was a performance at The Squidz Club where they played three original songs and one cover, “You’ve got the love”. 

After playing the members then turned all the equipment around and encouraged the audience to get up and start playing!

That initial performance went really well and was a great start in demonstrating it was possible to progress and improve skills within the structure of the Pop-Up Band. It’s become a great way to share how the same equipment can be accessible to people, both encouraging them to engage with music technology but also experiment with it once they are comfortable.

The whole thing was very organic - responding to questions raised by the ongoing work in SoundLab and supporting the wants of the musicians involved. The members of the band were keen to do more after the initial collaboration so another rehearsal was arranged to get the band back together and see how far their progression could go...