At the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, students are transforming tactile music creation into newfound confidence and independence.
AUSTIN, Texas — What started as an after-school experiment at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired has turned into a full-fledged band that’s not only making music, but building confidence.
Inside a small classroom on the school’s North Austin campus, students learn to make electronic music using analog synthesizers — the kind packed with knobs and switches, not screens. The class, called “Synthesis and Sound Design,” is led by Daniel Butler, a residential specialist who saw opportunity in the tactile instruments.
“I was playing with an old analog synthesizer and realized it was completely tactile,” Butler said. “There were no menus or anything, and I just had this moment of realizing this might be a really cool instrument to teach to students who are blind or have low vision.”
From that idea came The Semi-Modulars — a band of students who record albums and perform live shows around Austin in the spring.
Each week, the class meets to explore sound, rhythm and teamwork. Butler teaches students to memorize each control by feel, mapping their instrument one knob at a time.
For residential music teacher and therapist Lacey Lewis, the lessons go far beyond music.
“They’re working together as a team, they’re making choices,” Lewis said. “Kids with special needs usually have less control over their lives, so being able to make those choices here — musically or personally — builds real independence.”
Lewis said that confidence feeds on itself.
“When they finish a song or play a show, they realize, ‘We did that — we can do it again,'” he said.
By the end of the school year, students have produced an album and performed for audiences across Austin — proof that music built by touch can resonate far beyond the classroom.