tekhnē

This fourth issue of the tekhnē online journal emerges from the Technology, Music and Ableism strand of the project, led by OUT.RA. Each of the contributions gathered here approaches the meeting of music and disability from different angles: collective improvisation, personal narrative, instrument design, listening practices, and advocacy for embodied differences as a lived and self-determined experience and identity. What runs through these texts is not a single stance on disability, but an insistence that – as music is a space where cultural norms can be challenged, reconfigured, and reimagined – it can be recognized as a site of knowledge, artistry, and form.

Bá Alvares reflects on collective improvisation with Os Heróis Indianos Romanos Africanos as a shared practice of difference, mutual recognition, and unlearning; Alan Courtis’ account of the work with the same group and countless others across the globe foregrounds improvisation not as skill display but as a shared space where hierarchies soften and listening becomes relational, and advocates for musical self-expression as a basic human right; Molly Joyce, writing as a disabled musician, examines how concert etiquette, virtuosity, and labor expectations encode ableist norms, and how rethinking time, rest, and help can reshape performance culture; Matt Robidoux’s Corn Synth project proposes an absurd-looking, tactile electronic instrument as a site of accessible gesture and playful co-creation; finally, Alison O’Daniel approaches sound through Deaf and hard-of-hearing listening, showing how vibration, captioning, and attention reconfigure what it means to hear.