Facilitating accessibility in virtual reality musical environments

Immersive technologies are showing increasing potential for accessible music making. Costs, availability, interfacing methods and open-source development tools allow for exploration of the potential to facilitate atypical minds and bodies. We present a participatory study on the facilitation of accessibility within virtual reality musical environments. This study was carried out during a series of workshops with an experienced group of musicians with congenital physical disabilities and a community music group of novice musicians with acquired brain injuries. We qualitatively evaluate prototype instruments adopted
for hand recognition. We examine this embedded process, asking how a musician may understand, organise and personalise their virtual music environment, while examining how co-locating virtual instruments with physical surfaces can be used as potential aids to accessibility. Findings show that when participants are matched to the technology, it contains potential for musicians to gain agency through a process of shared knowledges and shared explorations. Understanding and personalising their own musical environment means perceiving affordances and uncovering hidden affordances. We find the quickly adaptable, visual, iterative processes of participatory design using VR is engaging and motivating for musicians and the wider network of stakeholders