SBIR Phase I: Enabling Musical Creativity for People with Special Needs

This SBIR Phase I project is dedicated to producing software that makes it easy for people with special needs, especially those on the autism spectrum, to compose their own music. A wide base of evidence shows that music can be a powerful emotional and creative outlet for people with disabilities. Multiple studies show that music can help children on the autism spectrum improve their skills in social interaction, verbal communication,initiating behavior, and social-emotional reciprocity. However, public access to music education has declined dramatically in the United States over the last 40 years. The 6.6 million students in the US with special needs face further barriers to music education because of the significant financial resources and demanding degree of physical dexterity required by instrument lessons. Within this context, private sector innovation is more necessary than ever to increase the accessibility of music education. By offering affordable and intuitive software this project has the potential to make a major impact on the economy by helping to reduce education and health care costs for parents of children with special needs, school special education programs, and adults with disabilities. Just as importantly, democratizing the joy of musical creativity will make a powerful contribution to unlocking the passion, talents, and productivity of people with special needs. To make it easy for people with special needs to make their own music, this project will employ gestural composition, responsive design, and data science to produce a software interface that adapts to a users' accessibility preferences based on their previous interactions with the program. A second focus of the project is to produce interactive music lessons focused on self-expression and socio-emotional intelligence. Lessons will utilize and expand upon the creative interface to guide users to write songs that express their mood. Robust user testing and intelligent application of machine learning will be required to ensure that the interface smoothly evolves to enable user creativity. Considerable experimentation will also be required to build lessons which strike a balance between supporting users through linear instruction and empowering users to make expressive decisions and take ownership of their emotions. To mitigate the project's technical risk special needs experts and health professionals will be consulted at every stage of user testing and development. In sum, these innovations address the significant and urgent challenge of opening music up as a medium of creativity, communication and self-expression for people with special needs, especially those on the autism spectrum. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.