Dr Anthea Skinner was a Healthy Trajectories Seed Funding recipient, awarded in 2022, who currently focuses her research on making music more accessible to people with a disability.

Since receiving funding, she has been busily working to promote and increase accessibility in music, in her project titled “Music Technologies For People with Disabilities: Creating a Framework to Assess Suitability for Individual Students”.

Her team describes their project as such:

“We conducted a multidisciplinary review of currently available adaptive musical instruments with reference to their use by musicians with disability. We are using this review to develop professional development resources and guidelines for music teachers who have students with disability. We have also been working with distributors and makers of some of these instruments to provide feedback on how they might better serve disabled students.”

Dr Anthea has lived experience with disability that coexists with her passion for music, as do three of her other team members, and the team have used their positions of expertise to co-design this project to tremendous effect. Not only have they forged connections with distributors of adaptive musical instruments, such as Link Assistive, they have also established the Adaptive Music Bridging Program (pictured above), in partnership with the Melbourne Youth Orchestras program, in which students with a range of disabilities are given the chance to use a variety of adaptive instruments.

The work of Dr Skinner’s team has resulted in a variety of articles being published to promote her work. You can read one of them here in Southbank news, where she mentions a pivotal moment in her youth was noticing that she was the only disabled person in her school band, and that there must be more kids like her.

We can’t wait to see more from Dr Skinner and her team.