The first DSF/CAMIN Meet Up & Music Festival took place over 4 days in March, 2024, at the Responsive Ecologies Lab (Re/Lab), and brought together the DSF and CAMIN Teams, graduate students, Community Music Schools of Toronto, and musicians/activists from the disability community for a weekend of music making, knowledge sharing and collaboration, while learning with and from the disability community (led by activists from Blurring the Boundary Arts, Arts Ably, and Drake Music in London).
Speakers/artists included musicians like Gift Tshuma, Dyllan Lambert Monroe, Molly Joyce, John Kelly, Miss Jacqui, as well as CMST instructors, Diane Kolin and Olfield Williams.
This event was co-sponsored by Designing Sound Futures (DSF) and the Canadian Accessible Music Instrument Network (CAMIN) and feeds forward into expanding our year 2 and 3 partnerships.
The partnerships and working groups developed through the event are working together now and collaborations will culminate in a final research workshop event where we will pilot our methodologies and musical instruments with our academic partners, the disability community/musicians and other stakeholders.
The DSF/CAMIN Meet Up & Music Festival is now (2025) feeding forward into BAMM (Building Access in Music Making), a Canadian-based international research network that brings together not-for-profit organizations alongside academics who work across the disciplines of music, education, technology, and disability studies to increase and improve access to music making by following a disability-led approach.
DSF/CAMIN Meetup
March 21 - 24 2024
York University and TMU Re/Lab
'Let's start with making music' - John Kelly
The DSF/CAMIN Meet Up and Music Festival event was supported by York’s Catalyzing Interdisciplinary Clusters Grant (CIRC) and a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (CAMIN). Goals of this project include:
- Transforming educational, community, and industry relationships while creating new forms of participation, music and instrument designs.
- Create new forms of music and new pedagogies informed by EDI principles — through transdisciplinary inquiry and ‘disability-led design’ (adam bell et al, 2019) of adapted instruments and new tools.
- Support disability-led design of interface properties, controllers, and adapted/new instrument design.
- Develop and share toolkits with cutting-edge materials and methodologies that can be ‘directly channeled into community-based social innovation’ (Baljko, 2022).
