Designing an inclusive concert together

Designing an inclusive classical music concert while involving in the design and mediation process people directly concerned by the accessibility features intended for them. This is the challenge set by the HEMU - Haute École de Musique, in partnership with the Sinfonietta de Lausanne and the University of Geneva, with its SensiMUS 2 project. On May 15, 2025, some fifteen deaf and hard-of-hearing spectators took their seats on a vibrating stage set up in Lausanne's BCV Concert Hall to attend a performance of composer Camille Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre dedicated to them. Here's a look back at the innovative collaborative process that gave rise to this atypical concert.

An educational, civic and scientific project

For over ten years, the HEMU has been working on a variety of outreach projects to make classical music accessible to audiences who feel far removed from it. SensiMUS 2 is part of these efforts, and fulfils a triple ambition. Pedagogically, its aim was to train future classical musicians to meet the needs and expectations of different audiences, while inviting them to question the place of sound in classical music and discover other ways of listening to music. From a citizen's point of view, the aim was to involve the people concerned in the co-construction of accessibility measures intended for them and, in so doing, to reinstate them as subjects with their own experiential knowledge and expertise about music. Finally, on a scientific level, its aim was to document the collaborative work that led to the concert and its reception, in order to contribute to contemporary reflections on the notion of accessibility.

A mixed working group

For over seven months, five HEMU students and three hearing-impaired people met monthly to take part in joint activities: cultural outings to experiment with different means of accessibility (play, ballet, concert), workshops on a specific subject or practice (vibration, chansigne), preparatory sessions to design the concert. Accompanied by a teacher in music mediation, the cultural mediator of the Sinfonietta de Lausanne, a sociologist and a musical assistant, the group designed an inclusive concert responding to the expectations and musical listening practices of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. In addition to practical work on the form of the concert, these meetings were also an opportunity to forge links and learn from each other.

A multi-sensory immersive concert

A stage and instruments vibrating in sympathy; the presentation of the instruments (timbres and vibrations) and the possibility of touching them while the artists were playing; the selection of a piece inspired by a poem in order to provide a narrative basis for an instrumental composition; extensive mediation work by the conductor to explain the story told by the music; lighting symbolizing this story; a time for exchange and sociability... The strategies deployed to make this concert accessible were numerous. One of them proved particularly innovative: a deaf singer accompanied the musicians, linguistically and aesthetically adapting the orchestral work into French sign language. An unprecedented encounter between symphonic music and deaf forms of artistic expression, this performance proved to be more than a simple means of accessibility, offering spectators an additional key to intelligibility. A genuine mediator uniting the various people present that evening (artists, deaf, hard-of-hearing and hearing audience members, stage management and technical staff), it led to the following conclusion: mediation is never a one-way street, and classical music would do well to open up to artistic forms that are still largely foreign to it.

The SensiMUS 2 project was funded by the HES-SO Institute for Research in Music and Performing Arts. It follows a first phase which involved documenting the introduction and reception of a new music mediation tool among the deaf and hard-of-hearing spectators of the Sinfonietta de Lausanne, the vibrosensory vests, and taking stock of their ordinary listening practices.