Therapeutic Musical Instrument

Client
Master's Thesis

drumm, my graduate thesis project, is a system of digital drumpads that both assists music therapists in facilitating group jam sessions and empowers the participants to express themselves. Melding research, product design, interaction design, and my physical and digital prototyping abilities, I designed and delivered a functional prototype with every feature rooted in a deep understanding of both therapists’ and participants’ needs.

product design
ui/ux design
design research
illustration & sketching
rapid prototyping
adobe suite
multimedia production
electronics design

I began my process with intensive research meant to uncover the unmet needs of both music therapists and music therapy participants. Through ten one-on-one interviews, multiple online community engagements, and a professional conference, I gained two very valuable insights:  First, therapists endure an immense cognitive load to both effect
positive therapy and maintain a musical environment. Second, participants sometimes felt disconnected from the music and wished they had more creative agency in the sessions. Throughout data collection, I constantly iterated upon journey maps of the group music therapy experience, noting problem areas. I distilled these problem areas into actionable design goals. Throughout my process, I incorporated co-creation sessions with potential users as a tactic of designing and testing prototypes. From creating their ideal musical instrument to writing beats on a MIDI keyboard, I gave participants opportunities to directly participate in the design process.

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Working through formal studies and interface ideas with pen and paper allowed me to generate many alternatives in a short span. Keeping my design requirements for simplicity in mind, I moved farther away from the typical format of digital instruments to more tactile interfaces, like that of game controllers and percussion instruments. These quickly converged into a natural solution: a drum-like, digital pad. To lower the barrier to entry to beatmaking for therapists, I also simplified the commonly complicated digital audio interface into an Adobe XD wireframe. By sketching paper prototypes, I narrowed the featureset to the bare essentials.

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To bring my vision together, I strove to create high-fidelity, functional prototypes of the drumpads. Combining my knowledge of rapid prototyping methods and microcontroller programming, I constructed two MIDI-enabled drumms that interfaced with a custom instrument rack in Ableton Live. Custom components included a laser-cut wood enclosure, waterjet-cut aluminum capacitive touch pads, and 3d printed interface buttons. Music therapists, after being shown the concept, were both elated at the idea and execution and deeply appreciative someone had taken the time to understand their experience. Many hoped that they would see drumm become a reality and offered to be beta testers in the future.

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