Technology Briefing

Warren Shadd invented and patented groundbreaking Assistive technology that ascends social skills, educates, and enriches the lives of autistic, deaf, blind and those with neurodevelopmental disabilities and neurobehavioral disorders. Warren and Dr. Phillip Pearl comprised a team of famed music, science, and medical researchers to present relevant discoveries and solutions accordingly.

Warren Shadd and I wrote a manuscript detailing the technical changes that augment the use of the SHADD piano to assist individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities including those on the autistic spectrum, deaf/ hard of hearing, and blind/hard of seeing.

The SHADD interactive piano is an acoustic hybrid with modern tools to help musicians compose, edit or teach. It features computer technologies such as touchscreens, an alphanumeric keyboard and scanner; four telescopic video cameras;  self-teaching and music page-turning software; and high-end surround sound speakers. Also, the “Carresser” bench is equipped with realistic surround sound speakers and a powerful bass subwoofer to increase the vibrations, which is useful to those with hearing disabilities.

It offers special  features to assist  persons  with vision loss, (who can read music by Braille), hearing loss (including special vibratory seating to feel the vibrations of the music’s frequencies), autism, (including distance teaching where the teacher can be anywhere for those with less comfort with a physically proximate teacher, or … special educators in regions remote to them), and patients with Alzheimer’s (people who’ve lost their verbal skills but can still express their musical language with SHADD’s technology).

Dr. Phillip L. Pearl, MD
President, Child Neurology Society
Director of Epilepsy and Clinical Neurophysiology
William G. Lennox Chair, Boston Children’s Hospital
Professor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School
Jazz & Classical Pianist

Mr. Shadd’s prototype has proven to be groundbreaking and extremely bold. Not only does one particular group of people will appreciate this invention, but people with disabilities can easily participate interactively in composing and performing music. With a subwoofer installed under the seat to feel out rhythms and to locate notes on the piano, especially for the deaf, Shadd has created a revolutionary hybrid piano that would have made Beethoven proud. – Prinz-D

Prinz-D
First Deaf Rapper

It was an epic moment to be part of history on testing the Shadd Hybrid Piano as a deaf pop recording artist. I was inspired and honored to meet the inventor who created such a phenomenal instrument that is so advance it blew my mind! It had the complete package of vibration, sound, visual effects and much more that would not only be great for deaf musicians but for anyone. Thanks! – Sho’Roc

Keith Sho’Roc Brown
Deaf Rapper 

It was an epic moment to be part of history on testing the Shadd Hybrid Piano as a deaf pop recording artist. I was inspired and honored to meet the inventor who created such a phenomenal instrument that is so advance it blew my mind! It had the complete package of vibration, sound, visual effects and much more that would not only be great for deaf musicians but for anyone. Thanks! – Sho’Roc

Keith Sho’Roc Brown
Deaf Rapper 

It was fascinating seeing, learning about, and hearing your electronically adapted piano; but the primary reason I’m writing is to reiterate how moved I was to be able to hear notes on the piano I’ve never heard in my life. As you know I began playing piano as a young child, have a BA in music, have taught piano for years and worked as an accompanist most of my life. However, due to numerous ear infections as a child which resulted in high range hearing loss, I have never heard the 10 highest notes on a piano. But as you were sitting at your piano “noodling” around, I suddenly found myself nearly tears when I realized I could hear piano notes I had never heard before! This was astonishing to me and an immensely moving experience. Thank you for taking the time to show me your “invention” but mostly, thank you for giving me an aural experience I will never forget!

Ree Rinn
Partially Deaf Veteran Pianist and Teacher

First SHADD Hybrid Interactive Piano, built in 2005

Pianist and opera singer extraordinaire, Carlos Ibay (blind) at the first SHADD Hybrid Piano, 2011

Current SHADD Hybrid Interactive Piano, built in 2023

Statistics and Solutions

“Notwithstanding that the SHADD piano is a phenomenal  musical instrument with a plethora of workstation tools for performing, recording, composing, interactive distance learning, and education – the reality that it can also be used as a beacon of hope for the betterment of life is a paradigm shift in the Music & Medicine arena,” says Warren.  “I believe that Warren has produced the world’s most important musical instruments!”

— Dr. Phillip Pearl

Autistic student, Nicolas McCoughlin, gets creative as he takes advantage of
SHADD’s Assistive Technology. Accomplishing the Mission!

Statistics

SHADD offers viable Assistive technology solutions

Solutions

SHADD helps Autistic & Spectrum

” When not interacting with a teacher on SHADD’s interactive network, the onboard self-teaching software also allows the autistic student to learn at their own pace and to practice with intended repetition until perfected. Also, SHADD’s ‘music page-turning’ technology that detects and follows ‘hand to note’ location in the music will automatically turns the pages at the end of the music – allowing the student to concentrate on making music rather than encountering other possible distractions.

Children with Autism are motivated by predictability and consistency which is why SHADD’s onboard touchscreens are the perfect Assistive technology tool for learning. “The touchscreens facilitate learning and independent functioning.

Accessing captive content via touchscreens increases attention spans and have been instrumental in reducing excess behaviors such as agitation, perseveration (uncontrollable repetition) and self-stimulatory behaviors, says Warren.” Touchscreens empower those with impaired motor skills and nonverbal dispositions to communicate. The touchscreens instill confidence and allow a certain amount of privacy to try things until perfection then act them out confidently via outward communication. Playing the SHADD piano lends this identical confidence when practicing, reviewing archived piano lessons or interacting with others at the piano.

Solutions

SHADD helps Deaf and Hard of Hearing

For additional audio and vibration, SHADD created the Carresser, an artist bench encased with surround sound speakers and a powerhouse subwoofer directed up. The Carresser gives the pianist a controlled musical vibrating experience never realized until now. “When you sit on it, it makes you feel as if you are sitting inside the middle of the piano, engulfed in sound. The fusion of piano and artist bench conjugates a nexus of body simulation from head to toe, a quantum leap for hearing loss,” says Warren. Feeling the audio of a SHADD piano and vibration of the Carresser bench is the ‘hearing’ solution to playing the piano sufficiently.

For really young deaf and hard of hearing children, the vibrations, surround sound, and programmed beats help them to learn rhythm, language, and how to count. Conceptually, SHADD’s interactive capabilities used by deaf and hard of hearing children are very effective. When taking piano lessons or interacting with colleagues, it increases self-awareness and awareness of others. It increases the attention span by requiring children to focus on an activity while steadily improving social interaction by incorporating others into musical activities.

Finding teachers in your neighborhood that are certified to instruct deaf and hard of hearing students is usually a challenge. That is why the interactive monitor and distance learning capabilities on a SHADD are such great tools. When teaching or taking distance learning piano lessons on a SHADD, the student can proficiently interact visually with sign language communication. Again, this kind of technology is not found on any other piano.

Solutions

SHADD helps Blind and Hard of Seeing

Solutions

SHADD helps Blind and Hard of Seeing

Solutions

Piano Music helps, even during Surgeries

Solutions

Piano Music helps, even during Surgeries

Listening to the sonata was also accompanied by increased power of the beta spectrum of the electroencephalogram in the right temporal, left temporal and right frontal regions. In a further study, listening to music in general, also resulted in greater beta power, particularly in the area of the precuneus bilaterally.

Mozart’s Effect on Epilepsy

A more impressive indication of a Mozart effect is to be seen in epilepsy. In 23 of 29 patients with focal discharges or bursts of generalized spike and wave complexes who listened to the Mozart piano sonata K448 there was a significant decrease in epileptiform activity as shown by the electroencephalogram (EEG). Some individual patients showed especially striking improvement. In one male, unconscious with status epilepticus, ictal patterns were present 62% of the time, whereas during exposure to Mozart’s music this value fell to 21%. In two other patients with status epilepticus continuous bilateral spike and wave complexes were recorded 90-100% of the time before the music, suddenly falling to about 50% 5 minutes after the music began. The fact that improvement took place even in a comatose patient demonstrates again that appreciation of the music is not a necessary feature of the Mozart effect.

To determine whether this music could exert a longer effect, studies were conducted in an eight-year-old girl with a particularly intractable form of childhood epilepsy, the Lennox—Gastaut syndrome, with many drop attacks accompanied by bilateral spike and wave complexes and focal discharges from the right posterior temporal area. Mozart’s sonata was played every 10 minutes for each hour of the day when she was awake. At the end of the waking period the number of clinical seizures had fallen from 9 during the initial four hours to one during the last four hours and the number of seconds during which general discharges occurred fell from 317 to 178. The following day the number of attacks was two in seven and half hours.

Specificity Of Mozart’s Music

To what extent are the changes attributable specifically to Mozart’s music? Following the initial experiments of Rauscher et al, most researchers have used Mozart’s double piano sonata K448, which the Mozart authority Alfred Einstein called `one of the most profound and most mature of all Mozart’s compositions,’ but his piano concerto no 23 in A major, K488 also proved to be effective. Some investigators observed that no enhancement of spatial temporal tests was seen after the minimalist music of Philip Glass, and there was no improvement in epileptiform EEG tracings after listening to pop music (new or old). In an attempt to determine the physical characteristics which were responsible for the Mozart effect, as many as 81 selections of Mozart were analyzed. The characteristic shown by Mozart’s music was a high degree of long-term periodicity.

The music of Mozart was analyzed regarding the emphasis on the average power of particular notes, notably G3 (196 Hz), C5 (523 Hz) and B5 (987 Hz). It is suggested that Mozart’s music, which has a high degree of long-term periodicity, would resonate within the brain to decrease seizure activity and to enhance spatial-temporal performance.

Brain Power of the Blind

‘Blind Tom,’ A Piano Playing Savant

Thomas carried many names during his lifetime, including Thomas Greene Wiggins, Tom, and Thomas Wiggins Bethune, however, you will learn in this document, that he remains internationally remembered today as “Blind Tom.” During his life and even a hundred years after his death, his name was followed by titles proclaiming him as the most famous person Columbus, Georgia has ever produced, and the most gifted musician to ever perform on a public stage.

Charity feared that their ‘slave owner’ would deem him a useless burden resulting in potentially dire consequences. Charity made a bold plea to Gen. James Neil Bethune, a fiercely pro-slavery lawyer and newspaper editor in Columbus, Ga., to keep her family together; probably out of pity, he agreed to keep only 5, then he ‘bought’ them. Thomas and his parents were taken to live at Bethune’s plantation shack where Charity washed laundry for the Bethune family and Mingo worked as a laborer. Being close to the Bethune’s ‘big’ house, Thomas could hear the Bethune children practice and play the piano the family kept in their front parlor. One night, when Thomas was three years old, the Bethune family sat at their dining room table for their evening meal. As they ate, the sound of the piano from down the hall interrupted the family’s mealtime conversation. With all children present at the table, the eldest daughter, Mary, got up to see who could be making the noise. Seated at the piano and tapping away at the keys was the blind, slave child Tom that had wondered into the big house.  After that night, Mary Bethune began teaching Tom how to play the piano. He soon became a kind of mascot at the main house when the young Bethune daughters sang and played the piano and he listened, seemingly in ecstasy.

It was quickly recognized that Tom had an abnormally strong memory. He could repeat full conversations that he heard between the family earlier in the day. After he learned the keys on a piano, he could hear a song played by someone else and play it back perfectly. He also was possessed of a keen sense of hearing. Sounds captivated him. He would wander into the woods at night following the sounds of birds or the wind through the trees. Tom could be drawn back to the house by the sound of one of the Bethune sons simply playing his flute in the yard. All the sounds that he heard he would remember. There was a powerful thunderstorm one night at the Bethune farm and the  next day Tom  recreated  the sounds  from the  storm on the piano.  This later became  one  of his own compositions titled, “The Rain Storm.” When he would play pieces unfamiliar to the Bethune children they would ask where he had learned it, Tom would reply, “The birds and the wind taught it to me.” He was said to be very energetic  and playful  all of his life, but when the music started Tom  would become  focused,  claim, and fully absorbed in the sound.

General James Neil Bethune, the owner of Blind Tom, reaped millions of dollars by exploiting Tom’s musical savant talent.

Tom had been born mentally and physically lacking, but that absence was made up for by an incredible increase in his sense for hearing and his capacity for memory. General Bethune recognized this and made sure that Tom had access to the family piano. The General once tried to hire a musician from Columbus to give Tom lessons. Upon hearing Tom play, the musician refused, reasoning that Tom knew more about music, in his young age, than anyone could ever teach him. The man believed that reducing music to rules and procedure would interfere with Tom’s innate ability. The musician recommended that Tom should simply hear great music played by professional musicians.

With that advice, General Bethune would take Tom into town to hear traveling musicians perform or would hire the performers to play with Tom in private. At the age of eight, Tom performed publicly for the first time at a hotel in downtown Columbus. To the white antebellum audience members, seeing a blind, dumb, slave child play classical music on a piano was extraordinary. Following that first successful performance, General Bethune took Tom on a tour of the country where Tom performed in packed theaters in all the major cities. With respect to political stunts, Tom would give renditions of well-known political speeches of the era in exactly the same cadence and intonation they were originally enunciated – and recite texts convincingly in foreign languages he could not even speak. Tom, the slave sensation’s  reputation became  so widespread during those years that, in 1860, at the age of ten, Tom was summoned to the White House for a command performance before President Buchanan. It  is documented that Tom became the first black artist to perform at the White House. He later performed for royalty in Europe.

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Tom possessed uncanny memory and recollection of musical patterns, word associations, and numerous languages.

Tom had been born mentally and physically lacking, but that absence was made up for by an incredible increase in his sense for hearing and his capacity for memory. General Bethune recognized this and made sure that Tom had access to the family piano. The General once tried to hire a musician from Columbus to give Tom lessons. Upon hearing Tom play, the musician refused, reasoning that Tom knew more about music, in his young age, than anyone could ever teach him. The man believed that reducing music to rules and procedure would interfere with Tom’s innate ability. The musician recommended that Tom should simply hear great music played by professional musicians.

With that advice, General Bethune would take Tom into town to hear traveling musicians perform or would hire the performers to play with Tom in private. At the age of eight, Tom performed publicly for the first time at a hotel in downtown Columbus. To the white antebellum audience members, seeing a blind, dumb, slave child play classical music on a piano was extraordinary. Following that first successful performance, General Bethune took Tom on a tour of the country where Tom performed in packed theaters in all the major cities. With respect to political stunts, Tom would give renditions of well-known political speeches of the era in exactly the same cadence and intonation they were originally enunciated – and recite texts convincingly in foreign languages he could not even speak. Tom, the slave sensation’s  reputation became  so widespread during those years that, in 1860, at the age of ten, Tom was summoned to the White House for a command performance before President Buchanan. It  is documented that Tom became the first black artist to perform at the White House. He later performed for royalty in Europe.

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In another performance, Tom played one song with his left hand, another with his right, and sang a third all at the same time and all in different pitches. He was known to jump up from his bench after his own performances and lead the audience in their applause, applauding himself. At the height of Tom’s career, his repertoire of performance music was said to consist of an astounding seven thousand established works, including those of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Mendelssohn, and Liszt, not to mention over a hundred composed by himself. One of his tricks involved playing “Fisher’s Hornpipe” with one hand and “Yankee Doodle” with the other, while singing “Dixie.” He could repeat political speeches he had heard months before, mimicking the vocal cadences of the speaker, even in foreign languages unknown to him.

There are countless testimonies to his fathomless skills, even if they often reek of paternalistic or white supremacist attitudes. During a tour to Europe when Tom was 16, he won praise from major musicians. The composer and pianist Ignaz Moscheles deemed him a “singular and inexplicable phenomenon.” The Norwegian violinist Ole Bull, though insisting that Tom was no prodigy in the traditional sense, described him as a “marvelous freak of nature.” Mark Twain followed Tom’s career for years.

Though his talents were astonishing, Tom’s concerts became outlandish spectacles. He had a habit of gyrating and moving his body spasmodically while performing with accompanying bestial grunts and horrible facial and bodily contortions, which some viewers declared as despicable sexual movements  by the big black intimidating gorilla man with suggestions that he should be in chains while playing the piano. And even while being promoted as the “Wonder of the World,” many described him as an “idiot,” even an “imbecile.” Perhaps most eerie was Tom’s tendency in concert to introduce each of his own compositions in the third person. In this regard, Tom shared to Bethune that he wanted the audience to enjoy and analyze his compositions and artistry opposed to concentrating on him as the freak show composer while performing. Bethune’s well-documented paternalistic, pro-slavery views and a nineteenth-century America mostly hostile to Blacks and endlessly drawn to the freak show, Tom’s handlers promoted the sensational aspects of the boy’s musical talent and his unusual physical movements as commodities to be embraced, exploited, and a comedic show to engage in laughter. It is a wonder that no one, as of record, has thrown items at Tom while he was performing.

Very little of his enormous earnings went directly to him. Gen. Bethune signed a contract with an ambitious promoter. After emancipation, Tom remained essentially an indentured servant to Bethune, who eventually became Tom’s legal guardian.

A disgruntled Tom, never fully performed again for the last twenty years of his life.

Perhaps the truest insights into Tom’s music — and, in a way, his life — are the compositions he wrote from childhood on, which were transcribed by a series of tutors who sometimes joined him on the road and who attested to their authenticity. Many were published and circulated widely during his prime performing years. In 1999, pianist, John Davis made a pioneering recording of 14 works by Tom in 1999, on the Newport Classics label — a labor of love that included extensive liner notes, including essays by the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the writer and activist Amiri Baraka. He and his works have been gaining increasing attention in the 21st century, including an informative biography by Deirdre O’Connell published in 2009, building on earlier work by the musicologist Geneva Handy Southall. Davis is credited for single-handedly reviving the lost legacy of the Georgia slave sensation, Blind Tom.

Among the pieces are bewitching scores like “Oliver Galop,” “Virginia Polka” and “The Rainstorm,” which evoke 19th-century classical styles, as well as parlor songs and dance music of the day. Davis also offers a compelling account of Tom’s most remarkable piece, “The Battle of Manassas,” a nearly eight-minute work written around1863, when he was 14, that evokes the first major victory of the Confederate  army, an event that had been recounted to Wiggins in detail. There is a ‘subversive quality,’ a ‘darker  underpinning,’  in much  of Tom’s music which was predicted to be a consequential of his condition, and his predicament as a slave.

“The Rainstorm,” reportedly composed when Wiggins was 5, is both beguiling and dramatic. It opens with a swaying melody over an oompah accompaniment. Suddenly there are low tremolos indicating rumbling thunder, and ominous roiling chromatic riffs in the bass, like the brewing storm music near the end of Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto.’

There are bursts of vehement octaves before the tension subsides, with parallel intervals creeping up into the piano’s high range. And then the dancing music returns. ‘Sewing Song’ depicts the mechanical sounds and rhythms of a device that clearly hooked the young Wiggins. Delicate arpeggios set the mood, followed by a wandering melodic passage, until we hear rustling figures that spin and flow in the high register of the piano almost continuously. Right through, in the middle range, a sad melody with tender chords unfolds, which is predicted to be a reflection of the environment of slavery. Even in these evocative lighter works, I hear lyrical flights, layered textures and intensely dramatic juxtapositions — the myriad expressions of a complex man who listened to the turbulent world around him and then reflected it in sound.

A disheartening turn in Tom’s life came in 1868 when General Bethune left Columbus for good, relocating just his immediate family, then sending Tom alone, with no supervision, to “Elway,” which was a farm in Warrenton, Virginia, forty miles southwest of Washington,  D.C. In 1870, Tom’s indenture contract with General Bethune expired. With his father Mingo now dead and his mother, Charity still living in Georgia, too far away to monitor her son’s ongoing professional affairs, no one was around to protest when Bethune had a Virginia probate judge declare Tom incompetent and name Bethune’s son, John, legal guardian. In 1875, John Bethune moved Tom to New York City with him, where both took up residence at the boardinghouse of one Eliza Stutzbach on St. Marks Place in Greenwich Village. Seven years later, in 1882, John married his landlady, Eliza. Their domestic bliss, however, was short-lived, and John attempted to have the union annulled. But before the dispute could be resolved, John Bethune was accidentally crushed to death while trying to board a moving train at the P.W. & B. Railroad Station in Wilmington, Delaware.

With his guardian’s untimely death, Tom, yet again, found himself the central bargaining chip in a custody battle. In 1885, Eliza Bethune, seeking revenge from the Bethunes following the discovery that she had been completely written out of her deceased husband’s will, induced Charity, Tom’s biological mother, to file a second writ of habeus corpus suit against General Bethune, a celebrated case that was batted around the U.S. courts for nearly two years. Finally, on July 30^th, 1887, Judge Bond, a federal judge in Baltimore, passed an order that took Thomas Wiggins out of the thirty-eight-year custody of the Bethune family. But instead of making him a free man, at long last out from under the yoke of slavery and the Bethunes, the court appointed Eliza Bethune, at the naive request of Charity, Tom’s mother, his new legal guardian.

Ironically, Tom was so distraught at his forced separation from his former owner, that, other than a highly- publicized series of return concerts at Manhattan’s Circle Theater in 1904, he spent the last twenty years of his life in semi-retirement. His ongoing absence from the stage spawned both rumors of his death, initially in the historic Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood in the 1880s, and the careers of various Blind Tom impersonators on the burgeoning vaudeville circuit.

The money, however, kept rolling in from the ongoing publishing of Tom’s sheet music and the few performances he did give. Profits were pocketed almost exclusively by Eliza Bethune Lerche, eventually married to the same attorney, A.J. Lerche, who had handled Charity’s writ of habeus corpus suit against General Bethune.

Tom was the first Black superstar performer in America, this country’s first documented outsider artist, and the first in a long line of African American musicians, including many of the bluesmen that followed, to have been canonized in life and marginalized, and all but forgotten in death.

Learn about Blind Tom’s historical journey

Listen to Blind Tom perform ‘Water in the Moonlight’

Listen to Blind Tom perform ‘Rêve charmant-Nocturne’

Listen to Blind Tom perform ‘March Timpani’

Listen to Blind Tom perform ‘Battle of Manassas’