ATU714 – CMPSR with Owain Wilson and Si Tew from Digit Music

Hi, this is Si Tew and I’m Owain Wilson. And we are the founders of Digit Music and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 714 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on January 31st, 2025.

On today’s show, we are super excited to be joined by founders Si Tew and Owain Wilson from Digit Music, and they’re here to tell us about the CMPSR and how it can help individuals with different abilities gain access to music. Don’t forget listeners, you can always reach us. Send us an email at Tech@EastersealsCrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We always love hearing from you, but for now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

Today, listeners, we are super excited to get to talk about music and specifically the CMPSR and how it can assist individuals of all abilities with creating and playing music. Si Tew and Owain Wilson from Digit Music are here to tell us all about CMPSR and how it can help individuals. Gentlemen, welcome to the show.

Thanks very much, Josh.

Hi Josh. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, I am excited to get into talking about the technology, but before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves?

Yeah, absolutely. So my name’s Owain. So as you said, I’m one of the founders of Digit Music. I am a musician by trade first and foremost, so that’s kind of where I cut my teeth. But I’ve worked as a teacher and also as a technologist as well. I’m a lot grayer now than when I started, so that probably suggests that I’ve been in the industry for a little while and that’s where I met my partner in crime, Mr. Tew.

Yes. Yeah, so me and Owain have known each other for a long time, both of us musicians, we’ve played shows together, et cetera over the years and produced for various people and we’ve done a lot of community projects as well, working with young people who weren’t getting on so well at school. And then that kind of moved into for myself, working with young people with access needs as part of a project called the Able Orchestra. I’m also a musician producer by trade, and I still get the occasional night in the studio and I write music for film and TV as well.

Nice. Awesome guys. Well, it sounds like, yeah, kind of a perfect storm of experience and then finding a population that maybe could really use your help. So I guess let’s start with the CMPSR itself and listeners just because you can’t really see here the CMPSR is C-M-P-S-R, pronounced like that. So where did the idea for this come from?

Yeah, I’ll let Si jump in here because he had kind of the first initial ideas for it.

Yeah, so it was the Able Orchestra project that I mentioned before. Quite a lot of the young people that were involved in that were power chair users, so we were kind of working with them through that project to enable them to be at the forefront of the composition process really. So we worked with professional orchestras like the BBC Symphonic Orchestra, the Hallé Orchestra and various others, but it was really about the young people who had historically been shut out of the music composition process being front and center.

So we’re using various different types of instruments, some of them kind of inclusive, some of them not, but it was there actually while we were on stage. And just seeing one of the young lads that we worked with, how incredibly accurate he was moving his power chair. And if anybody has driven a power chair or had to support somebody in driving one, they’re not the easiest things to, you’ve got to have some skill and dexterity to be able to get around in there.

So it just gave us the idea, let’s use that interface, that kind of ergonomically designed interface and switch it into music so that somebody can use all of the skills and the dexterity and the familiarity that they’ve built up over the years of exploring the world with this device and let’s enable them to explore music. So that was kind of where the idea was birthed, really.

Excellent. And I guess describe the device to our listeners.

So as you mentioned, this is a joystick device, so if anyone can imagine what a power wheelchair joystick looks like, it’s very similar to that. So at the top we have got a joystick, and then below it we’ve got eight buttons. You play music, so notes, chords, by moving the joystick in one of eight directions and it’ll play a different note from a chosen key and scale. You can change the key and scale as well as you would do if you pick up any other traditional instrument, you decide what you’re playing.

And then we also have a little notation system that goes along with it as well called Arrow Notes. It’s really colorful and it’s really visual, so there’s a little donut that sits around the joystick, and then also on the bottom there’s a RAM mount. So the RAM mount’s really important because this allows us to attach it to a wheelchair, to a mic stand, to a table. So really rather than the person having to adapt themselves to the instrument, the instrument adapts itself to them.

Nice. You mentioned I can change from notes to chords and everything. I guess how exactly does it work?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I mean for us, again, with our backgrounds as producers and performers, I’m not throwing Owain under the bus here, but neither of us I would say are particularly theoretically skilled musicians.

He’ll throw me under the bus.

We don’t come from a conservatoire world, we come from making a dance floor move and performing electronic music, but quite often having to be organic and working with other instruments and other bands, etc. So we’ve kind of put all of our skills and experience and the kind of technical requirements that we had over the years into CMPSR to try to distill it down into an interface that you can play with one finger or appendage.

So you move the joystick to play the notes. So we’ve broken down a musical scale, we do something called open tuning. So in a scale you select the notes that you want to play and that gives you the scale, whether that’s minor, whether that’s major, whether it’s happy or melancholic.

And what we’ve done is kind of picked those eight notes out and mapped them to eight directions on the joystick. So there’s various different ways. We won’t go too nerdy on the kind of musical mapping there, but we’ve set it up in such a way that if you wanted to play a chord, which is more than one note, you can play that with much reduced movement. So all of the correct note numbers are in the correct places, et cetera.

So the speed that you move the joystick makes the notes sound louder or quieter. And then by using the pads which sit below the joystick, it’s kind of eight buttons with LED pads on them, they change what the joystick is doing. So in its simplest setup, you move the joystick and it will play one note. And when I say it will play one note, that means it connects to either your computer, to your phone, to your tablet, to your studio, if that’s where you’re going, but it’ll work on almost any device really.

And combined with our app, which is called Swipe, basically you connect the two together and each movement of the joystick will play a note from Swipe. Now when you press the pads, you can change that from going from single notes in each direction to chords in each direction, and everything’s all in the right tuning, so everything’s just going to work as you want. You can make the sounds much, much deeper by selecting, changing the octaves on the pads or much, much higher. And then you can get quite complex in terms of the chord shapes and things that you are doing. And you can also set it up so that the distance that you move from the center out to whichever direction you choose kind of increases the expression. So think how a cello where somebody would play that and they would increase the force on the bow. You can kind of get that same feel by just moving the joystick slowly out to the extremities.

So we kind of refer to it as sort of bowling with the bumpers up. You’ve got all the notes there, and it’s for you, as the performer, to choose which notes you want to play in what order with what expression. But what we’ve done is just removed any of the notes that don’t work, and we’ve removed any of the necessity for theoretical knowledge to understand how to build the chords that you need. So it’s just about getting in and experimenting and playing and seeing what you like, really.

Yeah, and I love how you can change so many factors of it. You can make it almost as easy or as complex as the individual might want, or as their ability would let them go. Or just from that beginner novice to maybe someone that’s a little bit more skilled, it could still match their levels.

Yeah. very much. We kind of say that, don’t we? It’s the instrument progresses with the player. We use them in the studio. So if we’re in right, and we’ve always got a couple of composers knocking around, then similarly we can go in and go into a school. I’m in my son’s school next week, for instance. He’s just started, so he’s in equivalent of kindergarten, I guess. But students in that setting can get in and start to play and experiment. So it’s really about the resourcing around it that supports it, but it can meet the needs of any musician really.

It can. And I think it’s about making people instantly successful with it. Anyone that’s tried to play a piano or a guitar will know that they’re fantastic instruments, but there’s quite a long distance between starting and feeling good about what you’re doing, and we all want to feel good about it. So if we can give people a musical experience where I’ve enjoyed myself, hopefully it means they want to come back more, but that’s where the depth comes into the instrument CMPSR itself then, that as they progress as a musician, there’s more depth in the instrument for them to explore and to master if that’s the way that they want to go.

And I love the way that you mentioned about bringing it to your kid’s school too, so that individuals with or without disabilities can try it out and use it and really see how it can help. So then if somebody does have a disability where it’s the only real access method, they have it, well, it doesn’t look odd, people are just used to it and like, “Oh, I’ve used that as well, and here’s what I did with it, and how do you use it?” And kind of open up that conversation and break. I mean, in kindergarten they don’t care. I have someone in kindergarten as well. They don’t notice differences between anybody, but as they get older, if they see that, it really helps with that inclusion part.

Yeah, definitely. And I think as well for the musicians that are using them as well, we work with a lot of musicians with varying degrees of access needs, and we don’t want to be putting people in silos where you go to get that instrument that’s solely designed for you. Everybody else in your community or sort of external to your community is using it. So I think for us, it was about making a tool that enables everybody to access music in the same way as well, regardless of their kind of access needs.

It’s kind of the core of inclusion, isn’t it? It’s like if you want to include people, you’ve got to give them all a very similar experience. And if then actually what you’re setting up is you’re setting different lanes for people and then they’re not including or rubbing shoulders with each other. And I think we always find in music as well, actually, it’s like it’s one of the most inclusive things out there, but actually the traditional routes to getting to it are quite exclusive. So I think with technology, we’re kind of allowed to almost rewrite the scripts a little bit, but if you just copy what’s already out there when you’re making something, you’re just inherently keeping the same barriers. So we wanted to use something that was not only accessible for those that have a very specific need, but that was just accessible for anyone that wanted to play music.

Excellent. You mentioned the app a little bit as we were talking. Can you dig in and tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so Swipe is, it’s the companion app for CMPSR, the joystick controller, but it also works on its own as well. So the app is built around the colored arrow directions notation system that we spoke about, that Arrow Notes. But what the app does is it adds an extra layer of inclusion and accessibility as well because it’s got different input ways that you can play it.

So with the joystick, obviously you move the joystick, nose, foot, mouth, finger, whatever you choose, but with the app, you actually just use normal gestures that you are using every day on your smartphone or on your tablet. So swiping and tapping, we all navigate that kind of tech by using those things now whether you’re scrolling on social media or on a newsfeed, et cetera. But then what the app actually also allowed us to do was because we were using touchscreen technology, iPhone, iPad, others are available, obviously Android devices, et cetera, but we could piggyback off of the head tracking functionality within those devices as well.

So with the app, you can actually play it with eye movement by blinking. And that was a really important thing for us because with the hardware, we knew that we’d got something that included a lot more people, but we also knew that the hardware still wasn’t working for other people. So it was like, “Okay, what’s the next step?” And actually as a company, if we’re trying to make things as accessible for people as possible, then obviously we’ve got to look at new ways and new products to do that. So the app turbocharges the hardware, it gives you all of these cool instruments to play, and there’s backing beats and there’s projects and there’s all things like that that you can explore in there, but it actually allows a new community of people to make music that the hardware wasn’t working for as well.

Awesome. That’s super cool. You probably have quite a few of these, but in your time developing CMPSR and really getting it out there, can you tell me maybe a story or two that really sticks out with you of someone using it?

How long have we got?

Yeah. I mean, I think it’s worth… We’ve obviously worked with people from disability community throughout this sort of process. And because a lot of this started with the Able Orchestra, there was a group of students there that have been really instrumental in this, one of those a lady called Jess Fisher who they’ll speak about shortly. But I think one of the poignant ones I think for us was we’d created this instrument and we designed it in the same sort of format as you’d see a wheelchair joystick, so the joystick’s at the bottom, and then you’ve got the pads at the top to access it. And actually the very first prototype was a wheelchair, power chair joystick that we just put the insides out and put our own inside. So then as we went on to next stage of prototype, we designed our own units and we tested with our team and with people around us, but you don’t realize how much when you’re explaining something to somebody, you bring your own bias into it when we were showing them the way that it should be set up, etc.

What we did was then sent it out slightly wider for some user testing and came back. Everybody’s like, “This is great, we’ve really enjoyed it.” And they sent us the photos back and every single one of them, bar maybe one or two, but every single one of them was using it with the joystick at the top and the pads underneath. So we were like, “Oh, everybody seems to be using it upside down,” and then it kind of twigs. It’s like, “Hang on, if everybody’s using it upside down, we just designed it upside down.” So I think we kind of flipped the whole thing on its head.

And as it is now, we’ve actually got, there’s a setting in there so you can choose which orientation that you want. So Jess Fisher, who’s the lady that I mentioned, she was one of the students as part of the Able Orchestra, was kind of heavily involved in the development. She was the first person to ever use the first prototype. And we’ve been working with her for years, but she much prefers it in the traditional setup. So she’s got it like that, but then she’ll go out and deliver workshops. And I think that’s one of the key things here.

Obviously we love music. We are always going to be sort of extolling the joys of just playing and performing music. But I think for somebody with relatively complex access needs, employment can seem like quite a… Yeah, exactly. Certainly doors are shut. So I think for us, it was really important about building a framework around this where somebody can go out and go and deliver, create a kind of work set for themselves and create a career for the. So Jess now goes out and delivers loads of workshops in schools and works as various kinds of projects driving inclusion, but she uses it that way round. But all of the people that are in the sessions that she’s running use it the other way round. So what’s quite nice is you’ve got that kind of differentiated sort of access point for people where people can set it up how they want.

I think just to add as well, we always joke internally now that Jess is way too busy to answer the phone to us.

Yeah, yeah. And she actually is.

She is.

She’s already gotten bigger than you guys.

Yeah, exactly. Which is great, isn’t it? It’s exactly what you want.

Guys, what’s next for digital music and for CMPSR?

Yeah, I mean, so the next 12 months is very much just about growing and expanding really. Really, really small company. It’s myself and Si, and then we have a software developer called Cyril who’s kind of like our secret weapon, he’s a Swiss Army knife. It’s fantastic. But really we are getting more known in the UK now because I think we’re bringing something very unique. And obviously when you have the instrument and you have the Arrow Notes notation and then all the resources that go around it, and I think the resources are really important bit, but we’re really excited because we’re actually starting to come over to America in 2025.

So this year’s a big year for us about coming into the States, really excited about just networking and meeting like-minded people. Music’s always such a good connector. If you meet a person that’s into music, it’s like, “All right, I know we’re going to get on, it’s going to be fine.” But then actually, if you then meet someone who’s into music and also into making more musicians as well, that’s a really story for us to have. So really exciting. Obviously connecting with you, Josh and I and Easter Seals and all of the Easter Seals community, we’ve got some exciting stuff coming up. I mean, we’re really lucky back in the last year with the museum with the-s

That’s worth mention actually, the Museum of Making Music in Anaheim. They’ve actually got an exhibition on at the moment called Music Unity, and it’s looking at how musical instruments or kind of various sort of projects, etc, have been supporting musicians from various communities. And one of those is the disabled communities. So we’re looking at, CMPSR’s been included there, and there’s some nice video content and things around that, which is really exciting.

And we briefly keep mentioning the content, but I think just to give that a little bit of context, we’re music producers first and foremost, but it means that we’ve always kind of created sounds and done sound design and multi-sampled instruments and things. But it means now we get to work with studios all around the world to create content that people can then engage with through CMPSR and through Swipe. So we’ve done a project with a studio out in East Africa in Nairobi.

We’re just working with some musicians out in India. I spent some time living in South America, in Venezuela, so we’ve got some really nice South American kind of content in there as well. And that actually speaks back to the connector piece as well. I’ve got some really good friends from Venezuela who I spent months writing music with and working in studios, and my Spanish is terrible, and their English was minimal. Yet because music was the kind of connecting factor, we’ve got these really, really strong relationships built through it. So yeah, so we’re excited about the resources, excited about the opportunities that are growing in America and really just want to, as Owain said, meet more people that would like to support more musicians really.

Yeah, and I think that always the nice bit for us is actually hearing music that people are making with instruments that we are creating. Because ultimately as a musical instrument, developer, creator, whatever we call ourselves, you are making them because you want people to be creative with them. And actually that full circle bit is hearing something or seeing something that they’ve done with it. So America, when you’re there and you’ve written some stuff, let us hear it.

Yeah, for sure. And also as well, I think traditional instrument, if you listen to what the music that most people are listening to outside of the classroom, let’s use education as the example. Obviously, traditional instruments are used within those, but there’s a load of production and things that have happened between that playing a note on a piano to how it sounds on the final record. And I think for educators, that’s quite a steep tech learning curve there not totally relevant to everything that’s happening in the classroom potentially.

So by using technology like ours, you can be instantly using sounds and backing beats and all of the things that relate to the music that student may be listening to, whether that’s dance music, it’s hip hop, it’s trap, whatever it might be. But actually the musical rudiments, the musical skills and the things that align with the curriculum and show clear development, all of those things are exactly the same. So we actually see, and particularly in the education side, we see our job as much supporting the student that’s using the instrument. It’s supporting the educator who, let’s face it, has a lot on their plate and a lot of conflicting things that they need to get done within their role. It’s supporting them to be able to deliver a really engaging technology driven music curriculum without the years of effort and frustration that come with learning all of those things.

And I suppose just to expand on that a little bit, at the end of last year, we just finished a really exciting 10-week pilot project at a primary school in Worcestershire over here in England. I sounded like I had my false teeth when I said that, but yeah, and it was really good because it took a non-specialist music teacher, brilliant teacher called Lauren, and thanks Lauren because she put her trust in us over 10 weeks. But what we gave her was all the instruments that she needed the software with Swipe, but then she had a 10-week unit of work that she could deliver. And for her it was really empowering because she said, “Basically, I didn’t have to think about anything. I didn’t have to plan anything. But also as well, I’m not a musician and I can’t play an instrument, yet I was able to lead 30 students over 10 weeks in whole class instrumental music making.”

And we were lucky enough to go in for one of the sessions and it was just really, really, it was so lovely seeing the kids just fully absorbed in making their own music, but then composing their own music with Arrow Notes as well. But then the really nice bit was seeing them all share that with each other. They were just really keen on sharing what they’ve done. But also lovely for Lauren as well, because she said, “I’ve got kids that don’t engage in lessons normally yet when we’re doing music, they’re constantly asking for, ‘Can we do music again? Can we do music again?'” And obviously that’s going to benefit them in their other school, in their other lessons within their school life as well.

Nice, nice. Gentlemen, if our listeners want to find out more and learn more about CMPSR, about Digit Music, about everything you all are doing, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah, so if you go to digitmusic.co.uk, so D-I-G-I-T-M-U-S-I-C.co.uk, go on there and you can find information and you can contact us on there. We’re on all of the socials as well, Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. And it’s always Digit_Music or for the education-focused stuff it’s Digit_Learning. And also if you want to email us hello@DigitMusic will get you through to one of us. We’d love to have a chat and give you some more information.

And then if you are just a solo person and you want to go and download the app, you can do so you can get that from the Play Store or the App Store, so you get a free trial, fully function unlocked for a period of time, but then also as well, you just get to keep the app afterwards as well. And then if there’s any educators out there they’re interested in finding out a bit more, we will be quite soon releasing like a whole class free trial version of it as well with some of the lessons from the ten-week unit of work that I mentioned.

And as we are seeing, there’s a massive crossover between the US music curriculum and the UK music curriculum. So because we’ve tried to map all of our resource in around the UK one, thankfully we’ve found that it means that we can point it pretty much directly at the US curriculum. And it means for any music educators out there that want to explore a bit of tech in the classroom and tick off importantly their curriculum objectives, then absolutely they should come and have a look at Swipe.

Awesome. We will put all that information down in the show notes. Si, Owain, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us all about this just really great instrument, really great tool, really great learning device, really great. Just, I don’t know, opens up accessibility to music for a lot of folks who may have not had it before. So thanks again for coming on and telling us all about it.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks so much, Josh. Thanks for inviting us on. It’s been lovely to chat and great finding out more about Easter Seals as well. We know we’ve got a very shared vision in what we’re all trying to do.

We definitely do. We definitely do. Thanks again.

Thanks.

Cheers, Josh.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124, send us an email at tech@Eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @InDataProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC@relayindiana.com.

A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.