Music orbs
Sensory Being
Profound Multiple Sensory Difficulties (PMLD) are a group of disabilities which render individuals with limited ability to process senses.
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The sensory beings project aims to view people with PMLD as people whose primary experience of the world, and meaning within it, is sensory.
Accessible Music Therapy
Music orbs is an immersive tool for expressing emotions and providing entertainment for all people.
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Simply plug in a computer and shake the orbs to interact with a song or make your own music.
Meet & Greet
Along with Joanna Grace of the sensory beings project I visited 3 different specialist schools over the course of 6 months to help out and learn about how carers teach and interact with pupils.
Music Therapy
The real breakthrough for me came from talking to the music therapist for the specialist schools.
I was able to join in with a music therapy session to learn about how it is not necessarily just a form of stimulation, but one of the chances for children to express their emotion.
Internals
The orb is formed of 2 identical injection moulded halves.
It houses a vibration speaker and a tilt switch.
By standardising the shape and changing the plastic composition the set can contain multiple textures with only one mould.
Roto Mould
The original design utilised rotational moulding to provide a hollow half of the orb.
However injection moulding proved cheaper and the ribs I modelled allowed for a higher strength to weight ratio.
Box and Wires
I chose to make the box out of 2 ply recycled corrugated cardboard with a composite face so as to allow users to customise the surface.
The box it's self never comes into contact with the users due to the lengths of wires that join the box to the Orbs.
These wires make it easier to perceive the action made in relation to the reaction of sound.
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The two choices also drastically reduce the cost of the Product making it more accessible.
System
The big challenge was to make music therapy accessible to all carers.
The early systems relied on patches I designed for "Virtual DJ" which dropped effects onto songs when an orb was shaken.
But these required people to download and run complicated installs.
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I settled on registering the orbs inputs as keystrokes. This meant it could register with any program that allows keyboard shortcuts.
Development
The early sketch models explored how music could be altered by playing with textures.
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I drifted towards electronic music creation as it needs less interaction from skilled professionals.
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The design was tested multiple times throughout the process before pitching to LDA Learning in 2016.
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LDA took the design to later development stages at their Manchester location.
