French Musician Pone Produces Music Album Using Only Eye Gaze Technology

Pone is in bed using eye gaze technology with a computer. His wife is standing next to him feeding a tube in his mouth

Guilhem Gallart, who goes by Pone, is a 45 year old French hip hop artist who has made some amazing music in the ’90s. In 2015, Pone was diagnosed with ALS, and since then has been a tetraplegic, tracheostomized, and is fed through a tube.

As an artist who is completely bed-ridden, cannot speak and move his limbs, Pone struggled a fair bit early on to accept his new reality. Getting some inspiration from stephen Hawking, Pone and his wife started researching speech generating devices and tracked down the one Stephen Hawking himself used, and started using it with eye gaze technology to generate sentences. Discovering eye gaze technology to write sentences that could be read aloud by the computer was just the beginning of an amazing journey that resulted in Pone creating an entire album on his computer using just his eyes.

pone seen here using eye gaze technology with ableton live software to create music
Pone seen here using eye gaze technology with ableton live software to create music

Pone used the software Ableton Live on his computer to record all the music, and patiently went on to create 11 songs for his album Kate and Me. He has made his work available for free so everyone could listen to it. Kate and Me on YouTube and Spotify are listed below:

While dealing with ALS and navigating public health to learn more about options available for people with motor neurone diseases, Pone also published a “ASL for Dummies” book which sheds light on a lot of vital information for the person diagnosed with ALS as well as their family members and caretakers.

Hit the source link to learn more about Pone and his life with ALS.

Source: The Guardian

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