Co-Designing Accessible Digital Musical Instruments With Young Children: Embodied Design Ideas From a Mixed-Ability Classroom

Abstract

The use of accessible digital musical instruments (DMIs) has the potential to lower barriers to music-making, yet there remains a lack of empirical understanding of their design and implementation within mainstream schools for children with mixed abilities. This article presents a project that co-designed accessible DMIs with children to explore embodied approaches to musical interaction. The project involved five co-design workshops with a mixed-ability class of Year 1 primary school children (N = 26), who contributed design ideas for a mobile app and a web app that translate physical gestures into musical outputs. Data were collected from worksheets completed by participating children and analyzed deductively, followed by human auditing and interpretive consensus. The findings indicate that children proposed natural bodily movements and intuitive gestures as interaction methods and used self-invented visual representations to articulate musical ideas. The study illustrates how child-centred co-design can elicit children’s embodied design ideas while highlighting the need for future research to evaluate how such interfaces affect children’s interaction, musical learning, and self-directed engagement.