Free, online registration required

Cyborg Soloists: New Approaches to Music using AI, Biosensors, Hybrid Instruments and Audio-Visual Technologies

London-based pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga presents a lecture-recital about Cyborg Soloists, his 7-year music-technology research project exploring cutting-edge music technologies. Dr Kanga will give an overview of this UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship project, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is also Senior Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. The project has created more than 50 innovative new works with 26 industry and research partners, developing new approaches to live musical interactions using biosensors, AI, motion capture and hybrid instruments. He will then focus on two key case studies. In Whatever Weighs You Down, he will discuss how collaborations that include disabled artists can facilitate new approaches to gesture-controlled digital instruments. And in Steady State, he will discuss the project’s groundbreaking use of EEG brain sensors to control sound and video. Utilising AI, new brain-computer interaction software, and holographic projections, the work turns the performer’s body into a component in an audio-visual feedback system, raising new questions about the future of AI in composition, and the use of biosensors as a new type of musical instrument. The presentation will conclude with a performance of one of Zubin Kanga’s own compositions, Hypnagogia (after Bach).

Running Time: approx. 60 minutes