Introduction: rethinking music, learning and design
In an increasingly digitized and technologically mediated music education system (Bayley, Reference BAYLEY2018; Ruthmann & Mantie, Reference RUTHMANN and MANTIE2017; Asplund, Reference ASPLUND2022), questions around how we learn, make and interact with music demand renewed scrutiny. Traditional models of music education, particularly those framed around the learning of a traditional acoustic musical instrument, have long privileged the cognitive over the corporeal, often framing learning as a sequential, skill-based process rooted in psychological developmentalism and formalist musical structures (Reimer, Reference REIMER2003; Swanwick, Reference SWANWICK1999; McPherson & Welch, Reference MCPHERSON and WELCH2012). These frameworks typically valorize individual achievement, notational literacy and stylistic conformity, frequently at the expense of affective, social and embodied modes of musical engagement (Green, Reference GREEN2008; Philpott & Spruce, Reference PHILPOTT and SPRUCE2012; Burnard & Dragovic, Reference BURNARD and DRAGOVIC2015; Kinsella et al., Reference KINSELLA, FAUTLEY and WHITTAKER2024).
Compounding this issue is the current political climate for music education in England, which increasingly privileges traditional approaches centered around staff notation, Western classical repertoire and theory-based assessment models (DfE, 2021; Spruce, Reference SPRUCE2022; Wright, Reference WRIGHT2010; Fautley, Reference FAUTLEY2017). Similar trends are observable internationally: in Australia, Canada and the United States, policy frameworks often reinforce Eurocentric musical canons through prescriptive curricula and standardized assessments (Ballantyne & Harrison, Reference BALLANTYNE and HARRISON2015; Schmidt, Reference SCHMIDT2017; NAfME, 2014; Abramo, Reference ABRAMO2016). These marginalize diverse musical expressions, particularly those emerging from participatory, improvisatory or technologically mediated traditions. Despite the growing relevance of digital and participatory music-making cultures among young people (Kallio et al., Reference KALLIO, WESTERLUND, HIGGINS and TAKALA2021; Tobias, Reference TOBIAS2013), educational institutions have been slow to adapt, often relegating these practices to the periphery.
Parallel epistemological tensions are also found in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and specifically in digital musical instrument (DMI) design. Traditional approaches in HCI have tended to emphasize usability, optimization and cognitive ergonomics, and those factors have been imported into DMI research (Wanderley and Orio, Reference WANDERLEY and ORIO2002; O’Modhrain, Reference O’MODHRAIN2011). However, HCI researchers and DMI designers alike have long been aware that usability metrics and technical factors are not the whole story (Redström, Reference REDSTRÖM2006; Jordà, Reference JORDÀ2004), and there is increasing recognition that instruments and interfaces should not assume normative bodies and universal tasks (Homewood et al., Reference HOMEWOOD, WRIGHT and SALGADO2021; Rodger et al., Reference RODGER, STAPLETON, VAN WALSTIJN, ORTIZ and PARDUE2020). Notions of expressivity and control are appropriate for some but not all musical contexts and are often nebulously defined when proposed as properties of particular instruments and interfaces (Gurevich and Treviño, Reference GUREVICH and TREVIÑO2007). An emerging alternative approach situates instrument design as a relational and affective practice (Hayes and Marquez-Borbon, Reference HAYES and MARQUEZ-BORBON2020; Norman et al., Reference NORMAN, STAPLETON and BOWERS2025), which Morrison and McPherson articulate within the emerging paradigm of ‘Entanglement HCI’ (Frauenberger, Reference FRAUENBERGER2019). However, Morrison and McPherson caution that the field remains at a liminal stage and question how posthumanist insights might be translated into actionable methods for inclusive, co-creative design.
This paper asks: what if educators and designers reimagined musical learning not as the transmission of discrete knowledge or skills, but as an emergent, situated process shaped through embodied, affective and more-than-human engagements with sound, tools, environments and others? What if design was not a question of optimization, but a question of co-performance, care and accountability?
Drawing on the work of Karen Barad (Reference BARAD2007) and Donna Haraway (Reference HARAWAY1988, Reference HARAWAY2016), this paper engages with posthuman concepts of entanglement. Barad’s agential realism conceptualizes phenomena not as fixed or stable, but as dynamic material-discursive entanglements that emerge through intra-action where boundaries, meanings and identities are enacted rather than pre-given. Haraway’s (Reference HARAWAY1988) notion of situated knowledges challenges claims to objective, universal truth, advocating instead for accountability, partial perspective and epistemological plurality. In her later work, Staying with the Trouble (2016), Haraway urges scholars and practitioners to resist resolution and remain with complexity, to attend to friction, uncertainty and the ongoingness of world-making. These frameworks provide a theoretical grounding for reimagining musical learning and interaction beyond human-centered, hierarchical paradigms. In this paper, we draw together insights from music education, HCI and DMI design to propose entangled musicianship as a perspective that foregrounds these intra-active relationships between people, technologies, bodies, sounds and social-material conditions in music education and digital musical interaction.
Music, disability and fragmented fields
This paper emerges from ‘Music and Disability: Deconstructing the Barriers to Full Participation’, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded research network that brought together a transdisciplinary group of stakeholders working across music education, digital instrument design, music technology, disability studies, psychology, policy and lived experience. The network was convened in response to persistent and systemic inequalities that limit disabled people’s participation in musical life. These inequalities span access to music education, the design and availability of accessible instruments and broader cultural, pedagogical and policy discourses that continue to privilege normative models of musical ability and engagement.
Rather than treating these domains as discrete problems requiring isolated solutions, the network sought to explore how their intersection might generate new approaches to inclusion.
Over an eighteen-month period, the project hosted four interconnected events, each designed to interrogate specific dimensions of accessible music-making across education, technology and design. The first event convened stakeholders from music education, including teachers, researchers and cultural organizations for a series of roundtables, presentations and facilitated discussions. These sessions critically examined dominant pedagogical practices and policy frameworks, surfacing limitations in current inclusion strategies. The second event focused on DMI design and HCI, challenging dominant techno-solutionist narratives. Through provocations and collaborative dialogue, participants explored how accessible technologies are often developed without sustained engagement with the pedagogical and cultural contexts they aim to serve.
The third event adopted a sustainathon model, a reconfiguration of the traditional hackathon format toward documenting and replicating existing designs to address a culture of ephemeral technical objects (Morreale & McPherson, Reference MORREALE and MCPHERSON2017; Zayas-Garin et al., Reference ZAYAS-GARIN, HARRISON, JACK and MCPHERSON2021). Hosted in collaboration with Drake Music and drawing on their instrument library, this session brought together instrument designers, disabled musicians and educators to revisit and iterate on previously developed adapted instruments, emphasizing care, longevity and shared authorship. The fourth and final event brought together a panel to explore the intersections of inclusion, quality and pedagogy, synthesizing learning from the series while advancing critical debate on aspiration, value and systemic transformation in music education.
While the network spanned a wide range of themes, this paper focuses on two central and interrelated facets of the discussions that emerged: music education, particularly within the English context, and HCI and DMI design. These two fields, though both deeply implicated in questions of access, have historically operated in parallel rather than in collaboration. By examining the tensions, synergies and disconnections between them, we aim to better understand the structural conditions that shape and limit disabled musicians’ opportunities and to propose more integrated approaches for inclusive practice.
Ethical approval for the network was granted by Birmingham City University, covering the documentation of the events through field notes and the collection of anonymized quotations from consenting participants. The focus of this documentation was on surfacing key ideas, themes and questions that emerged during the events, rather than conducting individual case studies or interviews. Participants were informed of the purpose of the documentation, and consent was obtained for the inclusion of direct quotations and shared insights within research outputs. The work is documented in a series of collaboratively created provocation documents (Kinsella, Reference KINSELLA2024, Reference KINSELLA2025a, Reference KINSELLA2025b). This paper draws on these situated dialogues not as data points but as affective and epistemic moments that informed the development of entangled musicianship. We propose this as a theoretical orientation that challenges discipline-specific solutions and instead foregrounds inclusive, embodied and materially responsive modes of participation and design.
This paper will begin with a brief overview of the music education landscape in England, situating current policies and practices within wider debates about inclusion, access and representation. Following this, we turn to the research domains of HCI and DMI design, tracing how technical and design innovations have responded to, and at times overlooked, the complex educational and cultural contexts in which musical engagement takes place.
Music education in England
In England, music education is delivered through a complex ecology comprising curriculum music in schools, specialist instrumental and vocal tuition (often provided by peripatetic teachers), alongside a multitude of community and third-sector organizations offering short- and long-term music-making opportunities. Henley (Reference HENLEY2011) characterized this landscape as ‘fragmented’ and ‘patchy’, prompting a call to ensure that all pupils receive a high-quality music education (DfE & DCMS, 2011, p. 7). This led to the first National Plan for Music Education (NPME) in 2011, in which Music Education Hubs became a mechanism to coordinate provision and create a more coherent, partnership-based model across schools and external organizations. The NPME asserted that ‘the best model for Music Education includes a combination of classroom teaching, instrumental and vocal tuition and input from professional musicians’ (DfE & DCMS, 2011, p. 13).
While the first NPME made progress in addressing some challenges of access and provision, its implementation revealed significant inconsistencies. As Spruce (Reference SPRUCE2013) argued, the plan often privileged narrow, formalized notions of musical knowledge rooted in Western classical traditions, approaches that marginalized informal learning, embodied practice and learner agency. This poses particular challenges for inclusive music education, where pedagogies must be flexible, relational and attuned to diverse modes of communication and expression, including those used by disabled young people.
Recent policy developments have continued this trend. The Model Music Curriculum (DfE, 2021), produced as non-statutory guidance, further reasserts a traditionalist view of musical progression, favoring notation-based, genre-specific approaches. Critics (Henley & Barton Reference HENLEY and BARTON2022; Spruce Reference SPRUCE2022; Young Reference YOUNG2023; MacGregor et al., Reference MACGREGOR, BREEZE and JOHN2025) have noted its lack of attention to inclusive pedagogies, learner-led creativity or adaptive strategies that support access for disabled learners. The second iteration of the National Plan for Music Education (NPME2, DfE & DCMS, 2022) continues to emphasize ‘access for all’ but does so within a rhetoric of excellence and progression that remains largely underpinned by ableist assumptions about what constitutes musical achievement. Despite references to inclusion, little guidance is offered on how to meaningfully embed inclusive practices or challenge systemic barriers that continue to marginalize disabled young people.
Consequently, music education in England remains shaped by competing policy logics where on one hand the aspiration to broaden access and participation and on the other, a prescriptive and hierarchical vision of musical learning that can inadvertently exclude those whose ways of engaging with music fall outside normative frameworks. For disabled learners in particular, whose creativity may be multimodal, embodied or non-verbal, the ongoing lack of flexibility in policy and practice continues to restrict meaningful participation and recognition (Ainscow et al., Reference AINSCOW, BOOTH and DYSON2006).
Accessible design
Within the field of HCI, accessible and inclusive design has emerged as a critical force in reimagining musical participation. The development of DMIs has opened up new expressive possibilities for those historically excluded from conventional music-making due to physical, sensory or cognitive barriers. Often employing alternative interfaces, gestural input or multisensory feedback, DMIs are uniquely positioned to respond to the embodied, affective and relational dimensions of musical engagement (Frid & Turchet, Reference FRID and TURCHET2021; Nijs & Leman, Reference NIJS, LEMAN and Dean2016).
Innovative instruments such as The Kellycaster (Ockelford, Reference OCKELFORD2020) and research programs like Inclusive Interactions exemplify how user-centered and co-creative approaches can challenge normative assumptions of ability, virtuosity and musical value. Research in this area demonstrates that adaptive instruments can enable high levels of expressivity, personalization and collaborative creativity (McPherson & Kim, Reference MCPHERSON and KIM2019; McDonald et al., Reference MCDONALD, FRID and FYANS2021). Disabled musicians across diverse contexts are increasingly using such technologies not only to perform, but to compose, improvise and co-create in both professional and community settings (Gurevich & Stapleton, Reference GUREVICH and STAPLETON2008), and while awareness is growing of the importance of disabled-led approaches to design research (Skuse and Knotts, Reference SKUSE and KNOTTS2020).
This relational ethos is further explored in the work of Drake Music Northern Ireland, whose partnerships with Queen’s University Belfast through the ‘Performance without Barriers’ initiative have developed immersive, accessible instruments such as virtual reality performance environments and eye-gaze-controlled music systems. These initiatives challenge not only what counts as an instrument but how collaboration, access and authorship are constituted in musical practice. As ethnographic research has shown (Samuels, Reference SAMUELS2019), the success of adaptive DMIs often hinges less on their technical sophistication than on the ecological systems in which they are embedded, tutors, communities, institutional support and shared pedagogical values. Similarly, Schroeder and Lucas (Reference SCHROEDER and LUCAS2021) demonstrate how the sustainability of accessible instruments is shaped by long-term relational practices, not just technical efficacy. Their work on distributed participatory design highlights the fragility of these innovations when detached from robust infrastructures of care and collaboration.
However, despite these advancements, the impact of accessible instrument design often remains constrained. A persistent disconnect between technological innovation and educational practice continues to limit the full integration of DMIs into mainstream music provision. Evaluation frameworks within HCI frequently prioritize technical novelty and usability (Barbosa et al., Reference BARBOSA, CALEGARIO, TEIXEIRA, CABRAL, BISIG and WANDERLEY2019; Bongers, Reference BONGERS, Wanderley and Battier2000), with less attention given to the pedagogical relationships and sustained engagement required for meaningful musical learning.
This fragmentation was a central concern that surfaced throughout the AHRC network. Although the network was based in England, participants recognized that these issues reflect international patterns of exclusion. In various national systems around the world, dominant curricula and assessment frameworks continue to privilege Western classical notation, solo performance and cognitive mastery (Ballantyne & Harrison, Reference BALLANTYNE and HARRISON2015; Schmidt, Reference SCHMIDT2017, Wright & Davies Reference WRIGHT, DAVIES and Wright2010).
In response, this paper will position entangled musicianship as both a conceptual intervention and a practical provocation. It calls for the reconfiguration of educational and technological systems not as parallel domains but as co-constitutive ecologies, where access is not retrofitted but designed in from the outset. This shift foregrounds a posthuman, ecological perspective that values difference as foundational rather than exceptional and that treats inclusion not as a compliance issue but as a site of pedagogical, creative and ethical innovation. To fully explore the implications of this reorientation, the following section develops the theoretical foundations of posthumanism that underpin this work.
The posthuman turn in music education and technology
Posthumanist theory has catalyzed a significant rethinking of how we conceptualize learning, interaction and subjectivity across domains. Rather than maintaining a centralized humanist epistemology, posthumanism foregrounds relationality, embodiment and entanglement, inviting us to consider how bodies, technologies, environments and discourses intra-act in co-constitutive ways (Barad, Reference BARAD2007; Haraway, Reference HARAWAY1988, Reference HARAWAY2016; Kinsella et al., Reference KINSELLA, FAUTLEY and WHITTAKER2024).
In music education, this shift destabilizes cognitive developmentalism and individualist notions of musicality that have long structured pedagogical practice. As Kinsella et al. (Reference KINSELLA, FAUTLEY and WHITTAKER2024) argue, posthumanist frameworks ‘disrupt the notion of human centrality and our relationship within the world’, recognizing musical knowing as distributed across assemblages of the human and more-than-human through instruments, gesture, space, sound and affect (Bennett, Reference BENNETT2010).
Posthuman concepts such as diffraction (Haraway, Reference HARAWAY2016), intra-action (Barad, Reference BARAD2007) and agentic assemblage (Bennett, Reference BENNETT2010) challenge linear and representational models of learning. These notions enable us to reposition the classroom as what Barad (Reference BARAD2007) refers to as a spacetime mattering (Barad, Reference BARAD2007): not a static backdrop but a dynamic, multisensory ecology where knowledge emerges through relational encounter. This perspective problematizes dominant assessment regimes in music education, which tend to privilege fixed outcomes, and progression along normative developmental stages (Philpott & Spruce, Reference PHILPOTT and SPRUCE2012; Ball, Reference BALL2003).
Within performative educational cultures, standardization and auditability have intensified, shaping a system in which creativity is often subordinated to quantifiable attainment. A posthumanist stance invites educators to shift from assessment as measurement to assessment as attunement, recognizing relational, affective and emergent forms of musical meaning-making. Clark (Reference CLARK2022) and others have called for pedagogies that ‘linger in the moment’, honoring the improvisatory, embodied and situated aspects of music learning that defy simple codification.
The posthumanist shift is mirrored in recent research in DMI design. The field long ago expanded its horizons beyond purely engineering-driven questions around digital sound synthesis and rigidly codified notions of expressivity. Practice-based artistic research incorporating improvisation and creative exploration is well-established (Green, Reference GREEN2014; Gurevich, Reference GUREVICH2016; Stapleton and Davis, Reference STAPLETON and DAVIS2021), and such outlooks can even guide technical development processes which upon close inspection are rarely as goal-directed as they might seem (Pelinski et al., Reference PELINKSI, MCPHERSON and FIEBRINK2025). The key contribution of posthumanist thinking is not so much the complex relationships between instrument, player and other well-defined stakeholders (Jordà, Reference JORDÀ2004; O’Modhrain, Reference O’MODHRAIN2011) but the contestability of the boundaries between any of these entities in the first place (Reed et al., Reference REED, MORRISON, MCPHERSON, FIERRO and TANAKA2024b). Where the player ends and the instrument begins was already very much up for debate in terms of physicality (Alperson, Reference ALPERSON2008) and cognition (Nijs et al., Reference NIJS2017). Posthumanist accounts also challenge the distinction philosophically, rejecting not only the Cartesian mind-body dualism but also the seemingly obvious distinction between humans and technical objects. Recent work has explored whether musical instruments might be better considered as evolving processes rather than well-defined objects (Waters, Reference WATERS2021); who or what determines the ‘locus of meaning’ in the relationship between a player and a digital instrument (Reed et al., Reference REED, BENITO, CASPE and MCPHERSON2024a); and where agency might be located in human-technical systems (Stapleton and Davis, Reference STAPLETON and DAVIS2021; Tahiroglu, Reference TAHIROĞLU2024; Butt et al., Reference BUTT, GASTER, RENNEY and PALMER2025). Such critiques reframe the digital instrument not as a neutral interface but as an active participant in musical becoming, a sociomaterial assemblage where histories, gestures, algorithms, bodies and affordances intra-act (Barad, Reference BARAD2007; Haraway, Reference HARAWAY1991; Bennett, Reference BENNETT2010). Morrison and McPherson’s (2024) perspective on ‘entanglement HCI’ examines the potential for design practices that embrace friction, multiplicity and relationality over universality and optimization. Drawing on Haraway’s (Reference HARAWAY2016) imperative to ‘stay with the trouble’, DMI design becomes a site of co-creation, ambiguity and care which is open to the complexities of bodies, contexts and musicking practices. Rather than asking what an instrument allows a user to do, posthumanist design inquires into what forms of life, expression and relation are made possible or foreclosed by particular configurations of sound, code, material and interface.
This approach has concrete implications. It enables us to design and teach in ways that are not merely accommodating of difference but fundamentally reshaped by it, foregrounding an ethics of care and of pedagogical humility.
Entangled encounters
The AHRC-funded Music and Disability network created a series of cross-sector events which were not only spaces for sharing practice but also for surfacing epistemological tensions, institutional gaps and emergent methodologies. In what follows, we present key insights that emerged across these events, organized around six interwoven themes: (1) challenging techno-solutionism, (2) design as pedagogical and ethical work, (3) the fragility of inclusive technologies, (4) music education as access work, (5) the need for systemic professional development and (6) ethical collaboration.
Challenging techno-solutionism
Across the network events, participants consistently challenged techno-solutionist logics such as the belief that innovation alone can ‘fix’ access barriers through new tools or interfaces. Rather than treating technology as a neutral solution, they emphasized that inclusive design must begin with a shift in values: from designing for disabled musicians to designing with them and to disabled-led approaches. This involves a move away from the deficit model that positions disabled users as problems to be solved, toward a relational, situated and ongoing process of co-creation grounded in trust, care and lived expertise.
‘It can be exhausting as a disabled musician. Not only do you have to be good at what you do, you have a lot of practical things to consider. It takes time and is emotionally draining’.
This statement, shared during one of the events, powerfully captured the often invisible and ongoing affective labor involved in navigating musical and physical environments that remain structurally inaccessible. It spoke not only to the logistical and material barriers musicians face, but to the cumulative emotional toll of being constantly required to justify one’s presence, adapt to unsupportive infrastructures or educate others about access needs. Network participants argued that access must not be treated as a matter of individual resilience or workaround. Instead, it must be designed in from the outset as a structuring principle that shapes technologies, pedagogies, spaces and relationships. Co-design, in this light, is not simply a method; it is an ethical and political commitment to building with, not despite, difference.
Design as pedagogical and ethical work
Participants reimagined design not as a purely technical or esthetic endeavor, but as fundamentally pedagogical and ethical work. Instruments were frequently described not as isolated artifacts or interfaces, but assemblages co-constituted by the relationships, values, knowledges and infrastructures that surround them. These assemblages include not only the material instrument but also the assumptions embedded in its design, the forms of documentation that accompany it, the emotional labor required to navigate its use and the networks of support that determine whether participation is truly possible.
‘It’s not about adapting to a tool, it’s about the tool adapting to how I move and think’.
This participant’s comment reflects a powerful reframing of agency, shifting emphasis from individual adaptation to collective responsiveness. Rather than requiring the musician to conform to the instrument’s logics, participants called for instruments that are capable of attuning to diverse embodied ways of knowing, sensing and creating. Design, in this view, becomes a dialogic process (Wright and McCarthy, Reference WRIGHT, MCCARTHY, Bardzell, Bardzell and Blythe2018; Zayas and McPherson, Reference ZAYAS-GARIN and MCPHERSON2022), one that listens, learns and evolves in relation to the people and contexts it engages.
Crucially, support materials and care infrastructures often peripheral in mainstream design discourse were identified as central to sustaining meaningful access (Lucas et al., Reference LUCAS, CUNNINGHAM, HARRISON, SCHROEDER and MCPHERSON2025). In this framing, design is situated as a long-term relational and educational practice, with shared responsibility across designers, educators and communities to maintain engagement and foster equitable participation over time.
The fragility of inclusive technologies
A recurring theme was the precarity and temporality of many inclusive technologies. While bespoke design was widely celebrated for its responsiveness to individual needs and contexts, it was also critiqued for its vulnerability to short-term funding cycles, staff turnover and the loss of expertise. One participant commented:
‘Bespokeness is a double-edged sword… The longevity of adapted instruments often depends on the availability of the maker or on limited academic funding cycles’.
This tension was felt most acutely in the context of adapted instruments, where sustainability is often jeopardized by rapid technological change and a lack of infrastructure for maintenance and repair. Participants highlighted the way hardware components become obsolete, spare parts become unavailable, and knowledge is seldom transferred from one maker to another, leading to instruments that are no longer usable even when they remain theoretically ‘accessible’. This technological fragility underscores a wider structural problem: access is often tied to individual champions or project-based interventions, rather than embedded in sustainable, systemic practices.
In response, participants called for open-source design practices, community stewardship and long-term investment in inclusive innovation, emphasizing that the future of adaptive instruments depends not only on their ingenuity but on the ecosystems of care, documentation and collective expertise that sustain them beyond the lifespan of individual projects.
Music education as access work
Music education was reframed by participants as a site of access work, not merely a context for inclusion but a structure that often reproduces exclusion through its pedagogical, institutional and symbolic dimensions. Participants identified multiple, intersecting barriers:
Physical – inaccessible venues and equipment
Curricular – rigid progression routes that fail to accommodate diverse learners
Attitudinal – deficit-based assumptions about disabled students’ abilities
Symbolic – the ongoing absence of disabled role models within music education and leadership
These reflections revealed how early disengagement is not about a lack of interest or talent, but often a result of structural inflexibility and inaccessibility. One participant noted:
‘I did a concert recently and it said it was step free, but backstage it wasn’t. I’m always thinking and planning accessibility. Venues may be accessible to the audience, not performers’.
And another:
‘Music education and formal routes are quite rigid. If you can’t access one bit, you’re put off the whole thing’.
This powerful insight underscores the invisible labor often carried by disabled musicians, who must navigate and compensate for systems, locations, venues, transport and institutional practices that assume able-bodied norms. Participants called for a transformation in how musical achievement is defined, moving away from narrow hierarchies rooted in Western classical tradition, notation literacy and solo performance. Rather than seeing inclusion and excellence as mutually exclusive – a dichotomy often reinforced in educational discourse (Henley & Baron Reference HENLEY and BARTON2022, Kinsella et al., Reference KINSELLA, FAUTLEY and WHITTAKER2024), the network surfaced a growing consensus that inclusive practices can and must be rigorous, high-quality, creative and aspirational.
There was also particular concern that even progressive inclusion efforts risk reproducing normative values if they fail to question the deeper assumptions about what music education is for and who it is designed to serve. As one participant explained:
‘I think there are two elements to accessibility in music that need to change – attitudes and physical access. There aren’t many disabled classical musicians. When you think about Paralympians, you can name a few, but you can’t name many disabled classical musicians’.
The lack of visible disabled role models was a recurring theme. As another participant shared:
‘When I first became disabled, I was looking for people that look like me on Google and I couldn’t find much. Things are changing but we still have a long way to go to change people’s attitudes’.
This was furthered by another participant who argued:
‘We need to extend beyond the instrument to encompass the cultural and institutional structures that shape who is seen and heard as a musician’.
This insight points toward the need to reconfigure not only pedagogies but also the broader conditions of visibility, value and participation within music education and society more widely. It suggests that inclusion must be embedded across all levels, from curriculum design and assessment frameworks to funding priorities, professional development and cultural narratives of musicality, not merely implemented at the level of access to tools or spaces.
The professional gap: inclusion as shared responsibility
In parallel to point number 4, participants voiced concern about the lack of training and systemic support for educators. Inclusive music teaching was often positioned as the domain of specialists, leading to fragmentation and inconsistent practice. There was a strong call to reposition inclusive pedagogy as a shared professional responsibility, embedded across teacher education, continuing professional development and leadership frameworks. This provision should not be reserved solely for specialist SEND teachers but should be recognized as a core pedagogical need across the profession. It must be at the forefront of both initial teacher education and ongoing professional development as one participant noted:
‘I didn’t get any training on specialist provision with pupils with complex needs, inclusive ensembles or engaging with pupils with specific needs or even an exploration into lived experience’.
This includes training on the social and medical models of disability, alongside more subject-specific approaches that address how inclusive practice can be meaningfully embedded within music education. The absence of joined-up thinking between music education and disability discourses perpetuates gaps in provision and limited innovation. This fragmentation was seen to affect not only learners but also educators who may feel underprepared or isolated in attempting to implement inclusive strategies.
Ethical collaboration and the labor of participation
Finally, ethical collaboration emerged as a central concern. Participants stressed that working across differences must be grounded in principles of consent, credit and co-agency, especially when disabled individuals are invited into research or design processes (Ymous et al., Reference YMOUS, SPIEL, KEYES, WILLIAMS, GOOD, HORNECKER and BENNETT2020; Skuse and Knotts, Reference SKUSE and KNOTTS2020).
‘Always ask potential collaborators how they want to be involved and how they want to be compensated or credited’.
This insistence on non-extractive practice aligns with a broader reconceptualization of inclusion, not as compliance but as a shared, evolving and ethically charged commitment. Participants advocated for diffractive methodologies (Barad, Reference BARAD2007; Haraway, Reference HARAWAY2016) that attend to complexity rather than reduce it; that embrace contradiction and multiplicity; and that see access not as resolved but as an ongoing negotiation within entangled ecologies of people, tools, environments and histories.
‘It’s important to understand more about me and what shapes me as a musician, the places I practise, the wider things I enjoy that shape me as a musician’.
The AHRC network events made visible the urgent need for sustained cross-sector collaboration. Participants emphasized that real inclusion requires more than adaptive hardware or well-meaning policy; it demands shared, ongoing and materially grounded practices that resist fragmentation. The challenge now is not just to design better tools but to design with communities, curricula and cultures in mind. Entangled musicianship offers a framework through which such futures might be imagined and enacted.
Entangled musicianship: reconfiguring systems, bodies and knowing
The findings illuminated the complex web of disconnections that persist between inclusive education, DMI design and broader music education systems, disconnections that are underpinned by entrenched humanist paradigms, instrumentalist assumptions and siloed disciplinary practices. These tensions do not resolve into neat solutions. Instead, when read diffractively, they reveal the need for a fundamental reorientation: not simply new tools or adaptations but a reconfiguration of the conceptual, pedagogical and material conditions under which musical learning and access take shape.
Entangled musicianship is offered here as one such reorientation. Grounded in posthuman theory and animated through cross-sector dialogs in the AHRC network, this outlook resists linear, outcomes-based models of education and design. Instead, it calls for an ecological, relational approach that positions music-making as co-constituted through human and more-than-human intra-actions, including bodies, tools, environments, gestures and histories.
This reimagining entails a series of interrelated shifts:
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Musical knowledge is seen as emergent from movement, relation and sensory engagement. It is not reducible to symbolic literacy or cognitive mastery.
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Accessibility is embedded through co-design and lived expertise, not retrofitted onto existing norms.
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Pedagogy becomes a dynamic practice rooted in attunement, improvisation and affect, not the transmission of fixed skills.
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Technology is not a neutral tool, but an active co-performer entangled in the production of meaning and musical identity.
These shifts are both conceptual and deeply practical. They imply structural transformations such as the rethinking of assessment frameworks and public examinations to recognize DMI-based expression, investing in sustainable inclusive design infrastructures and embedding inclusive pedagogies in teacher training and curriculum policy. Crucially, they demand new alliances across education, technology, disability, arts and policy, alliances grounded in ethical relationality, shared responsibility and openness to more-than-human epistemologies.
But this framework also invites a deeper ontological shift, a re-(e)valuation of corporeality as central to musical learning. Posthumanist and new materialist thinkers challenge the ideal of the autonomous, rational subject and instead position the body as a site of becoming – shaped through rhythms, intensities and affective resonance with both human and nonhuman actants (Spiel, Reference SPIEL2021; Homewood et al., Reference HOMEWOOD, WRIGHT and SALGADO2021; Sanches et al., Reference SANCHES, HOWELL, TSAKNAKI, JENKINS and HELMS2022). In both music education and DMI design, normative assumptions about dexterity, perception and endurance have historically marginalized many disabled musicians and learners. Entangled musicianship insists that we begin not with deficit, but with difference and recognize corporeal variation as a source of creative potential.
This rethinking of embodiment transforms pedagogical and design imaginaries. It reframes assessment as attunement, invites curricula that value sensory exploration and improvisation and calls for instruments that adapt to and evolve with the bodies that play them. As scholars like Asplund (Reference ASPLUND2022) and Ingold & Bates (Reference INGOLD and BATES2021) remind us, musicking is never a solitary act; it is always a relational, co-performed negotiation across bodies, technologies, materials and cultural histories.
Crucially, this corporeal orientation also unsettles long-dominant learning theories that continue to shape educational systems internationally. Frameworks grounded in cognitivism and symbolic representation, such as those of Piaget (Reference PIAGET1950), Bloom (Reference BLOOM1956) and Reference BRUNERBruner (1960), remain foundational in curriculum design, assessment structures and teacher education. These models tend to prioritize internal mental processes, linear developmental stages and individual cognitive mastery, often at the expense of sensory, embodied and relational forms of knowing. Their enduring prominence reflects a broader tendency within education to locate learning within the mind, rather than across dynamic human and nonhuman assemblages.
Posthumanist perspectives offer a necessary rupture. Learning is no longer conceived as the transmission of content to a bounded individual, but as an emergent, situated phenomenon enacted through intra-action (Barad, Reference BARAD2007) between bodies, tools, sounds, spaces and histories. Corporeality, then, is not a barrier to be managed, but the very condition of creative and educational possibility.
In drawing together theory, practice and empirical insights from across the AHRC network, this paper contributes a timely intervention into both music education and digital musical interaction. It challenges dominant paradigms rooted in cognitive individualism, symbolic assessment and technocratic design, offering instead a situated, ecological and ethically responsive framework. Entangled musicianship is not a prescriptive model, but a generative agenda: one that invites us to stay with complexity, attend to difference and reimagine what and who music education and digital design are for.
Diffractive methodologies: reading across fields, practices and differences
Methodologically, the AHRC network also revealed that knowledge did not emerge from isolated disciplines or predetermined categories of expertise but from the interference patterns generated when perspectives, experiences and domains were brought into relation with each other. To engage seriously with posthumanist theory in education, music and design is therefore to reckon with the methodological implications of entanglement, materiality and more-than-human agency, implications made visible through the network’s unfolding encounters.
This paper does not simply apply theory to data; it works with theory to reimagine what knowledge is, how it emerges and how we remain accountable to its complexity. The concept of diffraction, drawn from Barad (Reference BARAD2007) and further developed by Haraway (Reference HARAWAY, Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler1992, Reference HARAWAY2016), offers a powerful methodological orientation. Rather than resolving differences, diffraction attends to how differences make a difference, surfacing productive tensions, collisions and overlaps that can reconfigure understanding.
The events themselves enacted a diffractive research process. Participants from music education, HCI/DMI, disability studies and policy did not simply exchange perspectives; their dialogs generated new shared critiques and relational insights. Frictions, such as the precarity of bespoke design, the absence of inclusive curricula or the extractive nature of some collaborative models, did not need to be nor could be resolved in the events, but were taken seriously as sites of learning and responsibility.
In the network, diffractive methodology was activated through:
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Reading across music education and DMI/HCI brings to the surface interferences rather than parallels;
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Engaging theoretical provocations not as external lenses but as intra-active participants in meaning-making;
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Treating the AHRC network events not as data collection exercises, but as situated, affective spaces of thinking-feeling-knowing.
This methodological stance is not neutral. As Barad reminds us, intra-action entails ethical responsibility. In this light, we foreground the partiality of our account and position knowledge production as a relational and accountable practice.
Within music education, HCI and DMI research, adopting a diffractive methodology shifts the focus from predefined outcomes and stable frameworks toward practices that remain open to complexity, affect and embodiment. These commitments underpin the framework of entangled musicianship proposed here, not as a generalizable model but as a situated, relational practice of research, design and pedagogy.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to OHMI and Rachel Wolffsohn, our partners in the project. Further thanks to all the participants in the AHRC Music and Disability Research Network : Jennifer MacRitchie, Holly Radford-Jones, Amble Skuse, Matthew Wright, Emma Brown, Brian Condon, Jessica Pitt, Cobi Ashkenazi, Maria Witek, Landon Morrison, Matt Davison, Lu Shannon, Simon Holland, Nicholas Canny, Lia Mice, David Baker, Christina Karpodini, Franziska Schroeder, Alex Lucas, Tychonas Michailidis, Tim Yates, Sophie Gray, James Risdon, Barry Farrimond, Sarah Whitfield, Bridget Whyte, Peter Worrell, Ian Burton, Lisa McCloskey, Jacob Harrison, Sara Dasent, Julie Sellars, Jason Dasent, Emma Nenadic, Adie Dickinson, Ruud Van der Wel, Jennie Henley, Martin Fautley and Deborah Amend. This research is supported by AHRC under grant AH/W010429/1 (‘Music and Disability: Deconstructing the barriers to full participation’).
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Victoria Kinsella is Professor of Education at Birmingham City University, where she co-leads the Birmingham Music Education Research Group. She has served as both principal and co-investigator on a substantial number of research projects, encompassing diverse settings such as schools, prisons, galleries and arts centers. Her work notably focuses on music education, creativities, composing, the arts and engaging with young people at risk of educational exclusion including those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND).
Andrew McPherson is Professor of Design Engineering and Music at Imperial College London, where he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, a research team creating and studying new musical instruments. He has a dual background in electronic engineering and music composition, and he has held several research fellowships including an European Research Council/UK Research and Innovation (ERC/UKRI) Consolidator Grant (‘RUDIMENTS’) exploring the cultural implications of engineering decisions in music technology. He is also a co-founder of Bela.io which makes high-performance embedded audio computing systems.
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