The creation, distribution, and deployment of the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) software represents a project that redefines our understanding of music—its creation, its meaning, and who can make it. AUMI also serves as a broader invitation to embrace innovative thinking beyond the realm of music, challenging traditional notions of normativity, difference, and democratic social relations. The existence of AUMI and the new social dynamics it encourages underscore the significant influence of disability rights and justice advocates, activists, and allies, highlighting their impact across diverse social and cultural spheres.
As a digital instrument available for free download, AUMI fosters democratic access to music making. It allows individuals who were previously excluded from composing and performing music to generate a wide range of sounds by controlling a visual cursor through eye, head, hand, and body gestures. AUMI’s technology can track even the smallest body movements, such as eye or chest movements from breathing, enabling users with limited voluntary mobility to create notes, chords, rhythms, and melodies using an apparatus that registers the slightest degrees of motion. When programmed to reduce sensitivity to motion, AUMI supports music composition and performance by individuals with active involuntary movements. This adaptability has significant implications for disability and social justice, highlighting its broader impact on inclusivity and access.
By overcoming the limitations of outdated technologies and conventions, AUMI creates new opportunities for a diverse range of individuals to engage in music-making. It paves the way for the creation of innovative musical sounds and fosters new social connections among musicians. In doing so, AUMI frees artistic expression from the physical and social constraints that have defined Western art music, allowing for creativity beyond conventional norms.
Instead of perceiving disability as an embarrassing impairment or a deficiency to be fixed or reluctantly accommodated, the disability rights movement embraces the value and potential difference. It draws attention to the harm caused not just to individuals, but to society, by narrow definitions of normalcy and normativity. Disability activism reveals how framing able-bodiedness as the standard leads to artificial, arbitrary, and irrational exclusions that misallocate resources, waste talents, and stifle creativity, invention, and innovation.
This according to “AUMI as a model for social justice” by George Lipsitz, Improvising across abilities: Pauline Oliveros and the Adaptive Use Musical Instrument, ed. by Thomas Ciufo, Abbey L. Dvorak, Kip Haaheim, et al. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2024, 47–63; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, 2024-9475).
Today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.
