Towards accessible Digital Interfaces for music creativity

This study addresses the challenge of making musical expression accessible to all by focusing on the design and evaluation of inclusive Digital Musical Interfaces (DMIs). We introduce a novel DMI that enables music creation through hand gestures alone, with the aim of addressing both able-bodied users and users with limited motor skills. The system combines adaptive machine learning-based gesture recognition powered with a modular, multiplayer-ready architecture that integrates seamlessly with digital audio workstations. The proposed system was developed through iterative prototyping and interdisciplinary collaboration, emphasizing usability, creative flexibility, and accessibility. The final prototype was evaluated through real-user testing to assess its accessibility, usability and its capability of effectively supporting expressive performance, showing that participants learn the system quickly: between the first and fourth performance, there was a 73% reduction in errors and a 22% decrease in mean time per note.