Abstract:

"Music education is, in its nature, human and essentially serves to awaken and develop human capacities." This phrase by Edgar Willems (1890 - 1978) serves as a starting point in the design, implementation, tuning and validation of a digital interface for teaching and musical creation with children from 3 years old, visually impaired or affected by Autism Spectrum Disorders. The values of illustrated society advocate the access to knowledge for people on equal conditions. Our own public and private education system is based on the merit declaring the equality of citizens. The main aim of our technological proposal is to demonstrate in the practice that the inclusion of students with visual impairment or autism spectrum disorders in the music room, both in schools and conservatories, is positively feasible through curricular changes and using some resources that optimize the inclusion. And in this process, the teacher is a fundamental key part of the educational inclusion. Teachers should have the tools, based on traditional and new technologies, which will help them facilitate and enhance and improve their task results. The design and operation of the interface, which allows the generation and combination of sounds in real time according to the movements made by the student, is based on an open hardware platform and on an open software development environment. These ensure, from the beginning, a cheap interface and make it available to the educational community a tool that could use and improve, if deemed, its performance according to their own needs.

Keywords:

Blindness, Autism, Music, Creation, Open hardware, Open Software, Comunitat Valenciana.