MPE's founding argument was simple: an instrument shouldn't force every note through the same flat gesture. A piano key gives you on, off and how hard — nothing about how the sound moves after that. MPE exists because a handful of controller makers decided a player's gesture should shape the sound continuously, not just trigger it. That same argument, it turns out, is also the organizing idea behind a very different corner of the music technology world: accessible instrument design.
What ABLE Assembly is
ABLE Assembly 2026 — the name stands for Arts Better the Lives of Everyone — is an annual conference held this year at Berklee College of Music, hosted by Berklee's Institute for Accessible Arts Education with participation from The MIDI Association. It isn't an MPE event, and its sessions covered ground far broader than expressive controllers: universal design for learning, adaptive piano and woodwind instruction, trauma-informed teaching, tactile notation and neurodiversity-affirming arts education.
The session worth noting
One part of the gathering lines up directly with the philosophy behind expressive MIDI: a hackathon called SPOKE, led by Tim Yates of Drake Music, built working MIDI controllers out of conductive materials — metal, fruit, fabric, graphite — shaped to whatever a specific player's body and movement could actually do, rather than shaped like a keyboard. The framing MIDI.org used in its recap was direct: "the 'instrument' can be shaped around the player, rather than forcing the player to adapt to a conventional instrument interface."
Why this belongs in an MPE roundup
It's worth being precise here: SPOKE controllers aren't MPE controllers, and nothing in the reporting on ABLE Assembly ties the hackathon to the MPE specification directly. What connects them is the underlying design principle, not the protocol itself. MPE's whole reason for existing is that a conventional keyboard flattens expression into velocity and not much else, and a small industry of Osmose, Continuum, Seaboard and LinnStrument-style controllers now exists to give that expression somewhere to go. SPOKE applies the identical logic one step further back, before the note is even triggered: if a standard keyboard's ergonomics don't fit a player's body, build a different physical interface entirely, and let it speak ordinary MIDI — and, in principle, MPE-style per-note data — on the other end.
A trend worth watching, not just a conference
The MIDI.org piece closes on a line that reads like a mission statement for both worlds at once: "Accessibility is not a separate category of music technology. It is central to the future of music making." That's a strong claim, but the hardware trend backs it up somewhat — conductive, DIY-friendly controller kits and adaptive interfaces have been showing up more often at the same conferences and trade shows where MPE controllers get demoed, and the two communities increasingly draw from the same pool of MIDI plumbing, per-note routing included.
What it means for MPE-focused musicians
For anyone building on or playing MPE hardware, ABLE Assembly is a useful reminder that the technical work behind per-note expression — mapping continuous gesture data onto sound in real time — has applications well outside "controllers for advanced players." The same routing logic that lets an Osmose track finger pressure can, in a different hardware shell, let a player with limited hand mobility trigger and shape a note using whatever motion is available to them. Whether that convergence deepens into shared standards or stays two adjacent communities solving similar problems independently is worth watching over the next few conference cycles — and it's a good argument for MPE gear makers to keep an eye on accessibility-focused design rather than treating it as a separate market.