London-based pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga returns to Australia to present a lecture-recital about Cyborg Soloists, his 7-year UK Research and Innovation Fellowship project exploring cutting-edge music technologies.
Cyborg Soloists is Zubin Kanga’s UKRI 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 generated more than 50 innovative new works, collaborated with 26 industry partners and been featured in The New York Times, The Wire and the BBC World Service. Dr Kanga will give an overview of this project which includes works that feature the use of brain sensors, AI, motion capture and hybrid instruments, followed by a discussion of 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 work’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. This work raises new questions about the use of AI in composition, and the use of biosensors as a new type of musical instrument. The presentation will include performances of two works commissioned by Zubin Kanga that utilise different approaches to AI: Gulf by Rylan Gleave and I Will Fix Myself (Just Circles) by Nwando Ebizie.
Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, and technologist. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing interdisciplinary music that seeks to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
In 2020, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. Cyborg Soloists is unlocking new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments. His Cyborg Soloists work was recently featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, and Limelight Magazine, and regularly featured on BBC Radio and the BBC World Service.
Zubin has premiered more than 160 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Paris Autumn Festival (France), Time of Music (Finland), Music Current (Ireland), Klang Festival (Denmark), PODIUM Festival (Germany), Gaudeamus Festival (Netherlands), Transit Festival (Belgium) and Modulus Festival (Canada). He was a member of Ensemble Offspring for 15 years, and has performed as concerto soloist with Manchester Collective, Explore Ensemble, and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using a KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET (performed 30 times across 9 countries as well as the BBC World Service) as well as, Steady State, that uses EEG brain sensors to control music and holographic video; the keyboard/piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano by Laurence Osborn, performed with Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre in London, and a new concerto by Rob Laidlow which will be premiered with the BBC Philharmonic, featuring an AI system modelled on the orchestra’s archives, performed with AI-integrated digital instruments.
For more information, you can visit Zubin Kanga's website and the cyborg soloists homepage.
