Willie Payne makes music education more accessible
The SILS assistant professor designs learning materials that are meant to be felt by low-vision or blind musicians.
Music has always been central to Willie Payne, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Information and Library Science.
Growing up, he sang in children’s choirs, played drums in concert and marching bands, and played guitar in the jazz band and pit orchestra. He became obsessed with video game music as a teenager and even attended a summer camp at the Berklee School of Music to learn how to score music for games.
At the University of Colorado, Payne learned software to create custom guitar effects and began composing music for computers and musicians. He also joined several electronic music ensembles, including the Boulder Laptop Orchestra, which uses laptops, tablets and other devices as instruments to create new sounds and forms of musical expression.
Payne later expanded his interest in the intersection of music and technology by improving the accessibility of interactive websites that Colorado professors used to teach scientific concepts.
“I joined the project and used my coding and sound design skills to build prototypes and try to convey these really visual things into sound, touch or other alternative modalities,” Payne says.
Payne’s journey brought him to New York University, where he earned a doctorate in music technology. While there, he partnered with blind musicians at the Filomen M. D’Agostino Greenberg Music School to develop accessible music notation software and form FilOrk, a laptop orchestra comprised of teens using code to perform electronic music.
Expanding accessible learning
At Carolina, Payne continues his dedication to making music education and STEM learning more accessible to low-vision and blind students through two upcoming projects.
The first will design tactile graphics — physical representations of visual content that aid in teaching music-related concepts. They will be printed on heat-sensitive paper, which allows the ink to swell, creating a raised texture that people with visual impairments can feel.
“There are distinct challenges in designing useful learning materials that are meant to be felt more than seen. Line thickness, information density and texture are all important concerns,” Payne says.
The other project involves interviewing low-vision musicians about how large-print notations impact access to music. Early findings indicate that vision ability goes far beyond notation access and affects fundamental aspects of one’s musical identity, including their choice of genre, instrument and collaborators.
“Designers tend to get fixated on solutions that work for 80% of people but leave out the remaining 20%,” Payne says. “Usually, people with disabilities fall into this minority. The argument behind inclusive design methodologies is that if we focus instead on the excluded groups, we’ll find a better solution for everyone.”
