Sonic interface designer Dillon Simeone visits MUC 262
Posted by karah.kemmerly
Dillon Simeone is an deaf audio engineer, electronics engineer, and designer working with Universal Music Design (UMD) team at CymaSpace, a local nonprofit whose mission is to enhance arts and culture accessibility for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH).
Dillon visited PCC’s MUC 262: Interface Design class on March 3 to share his approach to interface design and iterative design for the DHH community.
MUC 262 is a second-year course in the Associate Degree for Creative Coding and Immersive Technology, which is part of our Music and Sonic Arts Program. It is an advanced class where students study user/human centered design techniques and work in a hands-on way to build new, innovative interfaces for controlling sound, light, and video.
Simeone’s process and technical advice expertise was a fascinating masterclass in human centered design, and was coupled with a table full of innovative sound and light objects designed for DHH musicians.
Students got to do some hands-on exploration with GeLu, a new instrument for deaf musicians presented at the 2024 NIME conference, among many other inventions. GeLu combines two bracelets—one with gesture sensing and haptic feedback plus another with LED color feedback—to help users visualize audio data synchronized with sound.