There won’t be any Grammy Awards handed out Sunday night to honor musicians with disabilities. But amputee drum wizard Jason Barnes hopes to see an adaptive category at the Grammys before long.
More than a decade after he went viral as the world’s fastest drummer, using a custom-built bionic arm, Barnes is leveraging technology to help people with all sort of disabilities record their own melodies and grooves. His year-old nonprofit, Cybernetic Sound, provides access to adaptive instruments, innovative prosthetics, pro-caliber tools for audio engineering and production, and other studio gear.
Just as important, Cybernetic offers disabled creators education, mentorship, and a sense of community. “The whole goal is to provide a space, create a movement, and get people back to doing what they love, which is music,” says Barnes. He didn’t have that sense of belonging after losing his right hand in an electrical accident back in 2012. That’s a big part of his motivation to bring disabled musicians together.
In addition to launching Cybernetic Sound, Barnes is exploring the idea of a live show featuring disabled supergroups, which might take place as soon as this spring. And he’s hoping the music industry will follow the lead of the film/TV industries and recognize that new voices and new perspectives can raise the caliber of the product—and are good for business, too.
We caught up with Barnes this week fresh off his trip to the National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) conference in Anaheim, where he worked on partnerships between Cybernetic Sound is and music industry leaders. He’s also actively recruiting musicians to make use of his studio facilities (which are based in Atlanta) and start showcasing the disability community’s talent.
To learn more about Cybernetic, visit their website at cyberneticsound.org. Our conversation is edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about the origin of this project. Is this an idea you’ve been kicking around for a long time?
So I’ve been in music my whole life. After I became an amputee, at that time I started working with Georgia Tech to develop prototype prosthetics for drumming. And then a few years ago, I opened up my own music studio with the help of my friend Matt Bankston, who was part of a nonprofit, and another one of my other friends, George Hamelin. When we opened the studio, kind of simultaneously, I had wrapped up a short documentary with Google that they put out on their YouTube channel. So that got quite a few hits, and a lot of people saw the video.
Throughout this whole journey, I’ve had people reach out to me from all over the world telling me they want to learn how to play drums but they don’t think they ever can, or they were once were a musician but now they can’t play because of a disability. I didn’t really have the ability to help them the way I wanted to, because all the work I had done with Georgia Tech, you know, they owned all that technology. When I started working with Google, my stipulation was that I wanted to make all the technology open source, so I could use it to help other people. And so I kind of decided, why stop there? Why not start a nonprofit for musicians with challenges to teach them how to produce records and play instruments? So that’s where we started Cybernetic Sound.
What sort of support do you provide people with?
We provide a workspace and an area for them to learn and experiment. We provide adaptive equipment, such as custom prosthetics—we’ve helped out two people so far with drumming prosthetics—and adaptive software like eye-tracking software or voice-control software. So if people are blind or they don’t have any use of their hands, they can actually use the voice-control parts of a digital audio workstation to control all the parameters in there.
We also utilize different MIDI instruments, such as the Arcana Strum. The strum is a custom MIDI controller for VST (virtual studio technology). It was developed as guitar VST, but you can use it for anything. It has buttons on one side and a joystick on the other, and the joystick essentially acts as your guitar pick. You can actually use the joystick to get clean guitar strum noises and tremolo noises and things like that out of a MIDI instrument. Because you can custom-make a MIDI controller any way you want. You can use video-game controllers to control VSTs. So there are a lot of things you can do there.
We also have some proprietary things. One example, I am making a secondary prosthetic right now that is for playing guitar. It essentially works the same way as the robotic drumming prosthesis. I would hold a guitar pick, and the more I flex my muscle, the tighter the prosthetic’s grip on the pick would be. So that’s what you would do if you’re trying to do really fast tremolo picking. And then the more I extend my muscle, the looser the grip would be, so you could get more of a strumming sound. That’s a generalized concept with it. It’s not quite there yet.
I also have the very first drumming process I made, which just uses basic mechanics. It has a couple leverage points, a ball bearing and a spring, and that’s what I’ve made for quite a few of our clients. The main goal with what we’re doing is to create momentum so one day, Gibson will have adaptive guitars, and other big music companies will jump on this bandwagon. They are already starting to, and we’re building a community around it.
Talk to me about the talent pool you’ve encountered since you opened your doors.
We’ve encountered a lot of people who have been sitting there for years, who were born a certain way, and they always wanted to do something musically but just gave up on it and felt like they couldn’t. It’s very nice to be able to help those people out and give them some hope that they can actually do this.
Then we’ve had people who are involved in traumatic injury—they played an instrument before and then ended up losing some ability. One of our clients is a drummer who was in a car accident and had his hand completely paralyzed from the wrist down. He played drums before this injury, and he decided to have the hand amputated because it was of no use to him, and he could get back to playing with a prosthetic hand. I built him a slightly different version of my very first drumming prosthetic. He was a very talented drummer before, but watching him get back on the kit for the first time, that was phenomenal.
We ran an article last year by a piano player who lost a finger. He felt that it led him into what was a really creative direction, where he developed a style he could never have had as a ten-fingered musician. Are you seeing that type of thing with your clients?
Speaking from personal experience, I have definitely seen that with my own playing. The drumming prosthetic I developed at Georgia Tech can play 19 beats per second, and you can create interesting timbres with that that you wouldn’t even think to do before. You can almost go new genres and a new style for certain things. And that is the goal. Why stop at giving somebody their life back? Why not kind of add this extra sense of drive and creativity?
But the biggest goal is that I don’t want people to feel helpless like I did. I had to figure it out myself, and I was lucky enough to link up with the professor from Georgia Tech. Right place, right time. But I was once in that boat of hopelessness. I want to be there for people who are in that same boat, and then completely change their mindset after they hear about us.
You mentioned the idea that one day companies like Gibson might actually start to produce adaptive instruments. Is anyone already creating instruments in that space?
No big company is making a line of products for adaptive people yet. A lot of the companies we work with are smaller companies and startups. But what I’m seeing in this industry is that accessibility has become kind of cool. I see it coming slowly but surely, and I’m hoping the pace picks up.