Cyborg Soloists: Music, Technology and Collaborative Practice

This presentation focuses on Dr Zubin Kanga’s research project, Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and based at Royal Holloway, University of London. Dr Kanga will give an overview of some of the project’s most innovative case studies, including the use of brain sensors, AI and hybrid instruments. The presentation will then focus on a case study: Whatever Weighs You Down, a collaboration between Kanga, composer Neil Luck and performance artist Chisato Minamimura. The case study explores how collaborations that include disabled artists can facilitate new approaches to new digital instruments, and how a particular realisation of a gesture-based instrument can be ‘built’ collaboratively, combining technological expertise, compositional technique and experience with gestural forms of communication.