An Ensemble of Tangible User Interfaces to Foster Music Awareness and Interaction in Vulnerable Learners

This paper describes an educational and creative experience based on tangible user interfaces for making music together. The learners involved in the initiative, aged 7 to 50, presented various forms of social disadvantage and, in some cases, also physical and cognitive impairment. The methodology consisted in building a number of user-tailored experiences to let participants acquire basic musical skills by a hands-on approach implemented through an ensemble of digital instruments. Aspects such as peer-to-peer collaboration, usability, and accessibility had to be addressed. The achieved results included not only the improvement of music competences in vulnerable users, but also the acquisition of social and soft skills. After analyzing the state of the art, this paper aims to investigate all the aspects of the initiative, starting from the design phase (devices, organizational aspects, learning subjects, etc.), then describing the experimental setting, and, finally, documenting the achieved results.