These Abilities

Music is often described as a universal language, yet the conditions under which it is made, taught, shared, and listened to are far from universal. Concert formats, rehearsal expectations, instrument design, audience etiquette, and even the assumed relationship between body and sound reflect specific cultural norms - norms that quietly define who is recognized as a musician, what counts as participation, and which kinds of expression appear legitimate. When we speak of “ableism” in music, we are speaking about these assumptions and the infrastructures that sustain them: not only explicit exclusion, but the quieter architectures of expectation that determine who feels welcome, what expression counts as “virtuosity,” who is asked to adjust, what kinds of sounds are allowed to be shared and who is asked to disappear into silence.

This fourth issue of the tekhné 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.

Rather than treating disability as something to accommodate or overcome, these texts ask what becomes possible when we begin from disability, from variation, from the multiplicity of ways in which bodies perceive, move, and resonate in the world, and turn them into an active force in shaping musical meaning: a source of aesthetic insight, of method, of relation.

A recurring thread is the question of language itself: whether to name “disability” directly or to avoid the term. Many institutions continue to soften or euphemize disability - “special needs," “differently-abled,” “these abilities,” reflecting discomfort rather than inclusion. Language is a site of struggle. Naming disability clearly, as some contributors argue, can be a political and cultural act: to affirm disability as identity, experience, and knowledge that does not require translation into inspiration or transcendence. The tension is not resolved here; instead, the conversation is kept open, acknowledging that identity and language are always in motion.

The words we choose do not just describe identity; they also organize relationships and expectations in musical spaces. If naming is political, so too is the boundary between “us” and “them.” Several texts address the subtle ways musical spaces reproduce this divide: when help is assumed rather than offered, when “equal weight” is demanded without regard for individual embodiment, when silence is enforced as a condition of belonging. The question is not simply how to include disabled musicians into existing frameworks, but how to rethink the frameworks themselves.

These social dynamics are inseparable from the material environments in which music happens. Technology appears throughout this issue not as a neutral tool but as a terrain of power and possibility. Instruments, software, captions, acoustics, room layout, and performance formats all shape who can participate and how. If technology can reinforce norms, it can also be redesigned to undo them. Likewise, improvisation stands here as a practice of co-creation, a tool which becomes a central methodology; improvisation demands attention to others, openness to uncertainty, and collective negotiation of form. It also refuses the idea that technique and tradition must be inherited in fixed ways, reclaiming music and sound not only as an aesthetic practice but also a social one: a way to make community through listening.

Across these contributions, Pauline Oliveros appears as a recurring reference point - not simply as an artistic influence, but as someone who understood listening as a mode of attention: an embodied, relational, and situational action. Several authors build directly from Oliveros’s pedagogical and community work, especially AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument), which positions accessibility not as accommodation but as design principle, where one does not seek to “adapt” existing musical norms to disabled players, but to redesign instruments and environments so that expression could emerge from the particular capacities of each performer.

The title of this journal issue, These Abilities, intentionally sits in tension with the impulse to rebrand or soften disability, asking how naming can become a site of agency rather than avoidance. These Abilities does not propose a new euphemism. Rather, it highlights the capacities, knowledges, and forms of expression that emerge when disability is recognized not as obstacle but as presence. The texts collected here do not offer a single prescription for accessible or inclusive music-making. Instead, they share practices of attention, relation, and shared risk - ways of making music that begin from difference rather than smoothing it away. The task ahead is not merely to “add” disabled musicians into existing structures, but to transform the structures themselves. This issue is one contribution to that ongoing work: an invitation to listen differently, to make space differently, and to imagine music otherwise.

To listen deeply is to listen socially; to make music with others is to practice interdependence. Deep listening is not simply poetic but procedural: we inherit listening habits, but we also have the capacity to reshape them through practice. It is no accident that Pauline Oliveros threads through several of these texts as influence, collaborator, or methodological ground. We would like to dedicate this issue to her ever expanding legacy.