On 3-4 December, "Geidai Arts Special 2016 - Disability and Arts" was held in the Sogakudo Concert Hall of the Tokyo University of the Arts (TUA) for the sixth time. TUA COI Site and others organized this with technical cooperation from Yamaha Corporation.

This event over two days was organized mainly by the Research on disabilities and expressions group. On the first day, we invited Mr Takayoshi Wanami, a violinist, for a joint orchestra performance of visually impaired and sighted musicians titled “Music in the Dark”. We also had a collaborative performance by TUA students and the dance group with a wide range of physicality, "Inclusive Field for Dance".

On the second day, there were excellent performances from one armed guitarist Mr Andrés Godoy as the main concert “Colors you can hear and Sound you can see”; a blind soprano singer Ms Natsuki Hashimoto; and students from Tokyo Metropolitan Hachioji Special School and Tsukuba University’s Special Needs Education School sang Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 with Geidai philharmonia orchestra. These performances all received a round of applause from the audience.

In cooperation with the Research on synesthetic media group, students of the Yokohama City Special Support School for the Visually Impaired created 3D dinosaurs which were shown moving to the music in a film content and received good feedback. Particularly, for the first-time trial of children with hearing impairment playing the drums to perform with an orchestra, the two groups “Research on disabilities and expressions” and the “Research on synesthetic media”, together with the Research and Development Division of Yamaha Corporation and Tsukuba University’s Special Needs Education School, developed a system that visually displays the volume and the music sheet in real-time, through joint research. There are now great expectations for the creation of new innovations in the field of disabilities and artistic expression.