Accessible Instrument Development Fund Blog #1: Lee Holder: The Calliope
We asked our 2023 Accessible Instrument Development Fund grantees to document their journey towards creating a brand new accessible instrument. First up, we have Lee Holder. Lee wrote the below blog to provide a detailed insight into how their instrument, The Calliope, was made!
Lee’s journey
I have spent my entire life looking at ways to make performing and recording music easier – first for myself, and then for those I have worked with from a multitude of backgrounds with myriad barriers and challenges to access.
The adventure started with analogue synths in the 1980s but was propelled forward with my discovery of MIDI, sequencing together an always changing array of gadgets to try and bring the sounds inside my head out into the world.
I was always frustrated with the options for getting expression into the machines – almost invariably standard keyboards for a budding hobbyist, although I was aware of wind and guitar variants. Frankly, none of these worked well for my body or my brain, and it would be decades before I found anything that worked better. That feeling of barriers and obstacles between the music in my imagination and the outer world has stayed with me and informed my entire musical career.
Weirdly, it took the music of rave and acid house to begin to change things significantly – the idea of tweaking sounds as a live performance led first to the repurposing of existing technology and then the development of specific equipment to normalise this as a performance technique. This happened while I was at art college studying model making and tinkering with electronics for the first time and beginning to explore live music performance in my spare time. Through a process of trial and error I began to build the setup that would allow me to compose and perform despite my inability to play an instrument in any conventional sense.
Three decades later and I’m now using those skills as the Disability Lead for The Music Works, collaborating with Sony, Drake Music and other industry leaders to build new instruments and ways of accessing music for those who don’t get on well with what already exists for any reason.
As part of Drake Music’s Accessible Instrument Development Fund, I have been developing a new music making device with Andy Jackson from Cheltenham Hackspace. The Calliope is based on a peculiar gadget I picked up as part of my collection of accessible music making gadgets called a Zoundz – technically an alarm clock, this device comes with a variety of tactile shapes that play sounds & trigger lights when placed on a translucent white base. In sessions at The Music Works, this had been a brilliant piece of kit for first access, especially when working with those on the autistic spectrum. One young person in particular would invent elaborate rules for games involving these pieces, and that led me to wanting to create a MIDI device that embodied this playful approach to music making and sequencing.
The design of the Calliope is based around RFID tags – these can be embedded in cards or fobs, which in turn can be embedded in pretty much any physical object to provide a more tactile interface. When placed on the sequencer board, these are read in order and transmit MIDI messages to another device. Originally our plan was to have these send a single note which could be used to trigger a loop and replicate the behaviour of the Zoundz before expanding on this with our own customisable sound sets.
However, we realised that the tags could be used to send various MIDI events – for instance, they can send a chord pattern, a sequence of notes, change tempo, alter filters with MIDI CC messages or anything else to send more complex instructions to the host DAW. This allows the Calliope to be used to make live improvised pieces of music based on chance, audience participation or any other rules the musician wishes to introduce, either alongside other composed elements or as a way of overcoming writers block and beginning a new composition.
By moving away from any conventional musical instrument paradigm as a starting point for musical play, the player can explore cause and effect through a more creative interaction that is not bound by any expectations of pre-existing musical knowledge. RFID tags can be embedded in familiar objects such as soft toys, and the MIDI signals can trigger recordings of speech which will change based on locations on the Calliope sequencer board, opening up the potential for speech and language therapy applications. RFID tagged objects can be chosen to explore physiotherapeutic benefits, such as embedding them in weighted objects that build muscle or grip strength when lifted to new locations and trigger sound effects or sequences. Exploration can be encouraged by coding RFID tags with MIDI events that can be simple or complex to help introduce music theory in a playful way.
We are right at the beginning of the exploration of how this technology can be used and presented in a way that is customisable and brings musical play to those who have faced challenges accessing conventional musical instruments for any reason.
We are currently at prototype stage and hope that we can create a version for beta testing by early 2025 with a view to adding in features that come out of play-testing.
– Lee Holder, October 2024
Watch Lee present The Calliope at DMLab London earlier this year!
