From my anecdotal limited experience working with one armed artists, they tend to take things a bit further. Having gigged a few shows over the years with DJ Don Tinsley, I think that adversity often becomes a driving force and motivator. Hell, outside of being a legendary deep house DeeJay, he was a semi-pro vert skater… like comon’ one armed vert?
You see it outside the arts too: someone climbing Mt. Everest with peg legs what have you… it just always seems like there’s a whole uppity “anything you can do, I can do better attitude” that comes with it, and I for one am sick of it. It’s like these one-armed bass bandits just can’t be content swimming in circles and letting us help carry their groceries so we feel better about ourselves. NOPE, they just barge into two-hand-man-land doing a thing better resulting in embarrassment for the rest of us in our otherwise safe able-bodied spaces.
Hakerman Bertolt Meyer here has a kick ass bionic arm but now uses it to control his modsynth’s CV with his brain. It’s cheating and should be banned from the otherwise fine sport of synthesis!
Together with Chrisi from KOMA Elektronik and my husband Daniel, I am in the process of building a device (the “SynLimb”) that attaches to my arm prosthesis instead of the prosthetic hand. The SynLimb converts the electrode signals that my prosthesis picks up from my residual limb into control voltages (CV) for controlling my modular synthesizer. The SynLimb thus allows me to plug my prosthesis directly into my snythesizer so that I can control its parameters with the signals from my body that normally control the hand. For me, this feels like controlling the synth with my thoughts. I show the prototype(s), explain how we put it together and how it works, and do a little demo