Augmented Instruments Laboratory

Making instruments for imaginary bands

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

21-22 April 2026

Artists, technologists and makers are invited to take part in a speculative workshop to dream up fictional bands, along with their musical imaginaries, and build the instruments they play.

Making inconceivable instruments for impossible bands.
Does this sound fun? Please, join us!

^{Piano Activities, International Festival of the Newest Music at Weisbaden Festum Fluxorum, 1962}

Application Deadline Expired

Let’s make a band

Let’s Make a Band is a hands-on, playful and critical workshop where music and technology get tangled up in unexpected ways. Together, participants invent fictional - possibly improbable - bands, complete with genre, look, member personas, and the universe they come from. From there, the focus shifts to the instruments: what would this band actually play, and how would sound, bodies, and technologies relate within their invented musical world?

Participants will be introduced to unconventional design approaches like absurd making and Dalcroze estrangement, and get hands-on experience with the Bela platform - a maker tool designed specifically for building interactive musical instruments. No prior experience with electronics or prototyping is needed. Participants collectively sketch, build, and play, culminating in a short gig where newly prototyped instruments are presented.

Beyond making, the workshop is a chance to collaborate with musicians, artists, researchers, and makers, learn from a group of experienced mentors, and leave with new skills, new ideas, and new friends.

Featured Mentors

Tove Grimstad Bang is a Postdoctoral researcher at IRCAM, in the ISMM (Sound Music Movement Interaction) team. Working in Human–Computer Interaction, her research revolves around interactive technology in contexts of music and movement practice.
Robert Jack is co-founder and director of Bela, where he works on product design and development for a range of open hardware tools and electronic musical instruments. He completed his PhD on the sense of touch in digital musical instrument design at the Centre for Digital Music (QMUL).
Giacomo Lepri is a musician and researcher whose work investigates the socio-cultural implications of digital instruments - combining sound art with critical/speculative design research. He is currently a MSCA Fellow at the University of Genoa, examining digital lutherie practices in higher education.
Andrew McPherson is a Professor in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London, where he leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory. He brings a background as a composer, viola player, electronic engineer and HCI researcher to the design and critical study of new instruments.

Throughout the workshop, the fantastic members of the Augmented Instruments Laboratory will be on hand to support and collaborate with participants.

Workshop structure and resources

Preparation task: participants are asked to bring a prompt - an object, fabric, sound recording, drawing, word, or any other small token - that resonates with the imaginary band they dream about. It should feel like a fragment of the world their band might belong to. The prompt serves as a starting point for collective imagination, a creative anchor that helps ground the speculation and open up the world of the band.

The workshop’s activities alternate between doing and showing: short sessions of collective making followed by moments of reflection and presentation. Each day runs from 9:30 to 17:00 - though afternoons may linger.

Day 1	Day 2
Welcome (9:00 am)	Bela Snippet
Dream the Band Up	Making
Lunch	Lunch
Pretending Imaginary Sounds	Making
Bela Snippet	Making
The Choreography Around the Instrument	The Debut

The workshop will be held at Imperial College London - South Kensington campus, London.

The tools and materials provided to the participants will include:

basic prototype materials (e.g. cardboard, foam, cork, wire, tape, string, paper, plastic bottles, elastic bands, metal tins, balloons, hot glue, zip ties, velcro, binder clips, staples, aluminium foil, markers, stickers, buttons)
textile materials (e.g. conductive wires, fabrics, leather)
basic circuitry and sensors
Bela maker platform (to be returned at the end of the workshop)

If needed, participants are encouraged to bring any particular tool or material (subject to communication with the organising committee - see Application Form above) and use any open-source or free resource. The workshop is free and open to participants aged 18 and over. We are unable to reimburse any expenses (e.g. travel or accommodation) for accepted participants.

From the initial gathering of ideas to the final presentation of artefacts, core elements of the event will be collaboration and mutual support. The organising committee will try its best to welcome and make everyone comfortable. Cordiality and sharing are therefore expected from all participants as well.

^{George Brecht, Chemistry of Music, 1969 - fluxusisland.org}

For the curious

The workshop is grounded in the idea that musical instruments are never just tools - they carry with them histories, assumptions, and ways of thinking about sound, bodies, and culture. So, what happens when we invent a musical universe that doesn’t exist, and build instruments for that universe? By sidestepping familiar music-technology categories like controller, mapping, or sound generator, the workshop treats instrument design as something that emerges from socio-cultural imaginaries rather than technical convention.

The workshop draws together different sources of inspiration: music practices such as Dalcroze eurhythmics, and critical, speculative and participative design methods, such as pastiche scenarios and ustopian design. It treats fictional bands not merely as characters but as whole worlds - with their own internal logic, cultural texture, and contradictions - from which instruments can emerge. It is conceived to foreground the situated knowledge and experiences participants bring into the room.

This event is part of DECODMI (Discovering Education in Communities of Digital Musical Instruments), an MSCA-funded research project. The designed artefacts and the reflections around them may contribute to generating methodological intuitions, heuristics or provocative statements to be shared with broader research communities. Outcomes, ranging from methods to design processes, will be disseminated through academic publications with a strong multidisciplinary outreach.

Front images credits: Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik performing Art by Telephone - Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) 1969.

The workshop is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101150317 (“DECODMI”) hosted at the University of Genoa.

AIL Open Seminars #009

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Join us for the next AIL Open Seminars series! This talk will be hybrid, in-person at the Library at the Dyson School of Design Engineering (Imperial College London) and live-streamed on our YouTube Channel..

Title: Critical Sound Synthesis - MORE ROAR!
Time: 11am UK time (GMT+1), Friday, May 16th, 2025
URL: YouTube Livestream

If you are in London and would like to join in-person please email t.pelinskiramos@qmul.ac.uk for directions

In this seminar, John Richards (Dirty Electronics) and Agnes Cameron discuss the recent collaboration MORE ROAR!, a digital synthesiser built using a tiny microprocessor. It explores what we call ‘critical sound synthesis’ that follows in the critical design and critical making line of thought. A synthesis that extends beyond sound itself to open-up reflection on technology and society. It builds on our interests in Dirty Electronics, collaborative making and sound activism. Themes that emerge include consumer culture, feature creep, information overload, and excess and waste, waste at a material and resource level. And noise and disorder, and technological- and self-determinism.

These themes have been further explored through the idea of entropy, broadly, inner transformations, decay and surprise. The synth is entropic. The more you play it, the more its sounds degrade, become re-ordered. Every restart, a different rate of degradation. ‘Raw’ sound weathered into noise and silence. We also consider this a form of ‘idio-synthesis’, digital sound synthesis at a material-like level that focuses on the idiosyncrasies and limits of a specific chip.

More … John Richards is known for his work as Dirty Electronics that focuses on shared experiences and critical making. His work is rooted in sound, and combines music, performance art, electronics and graphic design.

Agnes Cameron designs, builds and maintains software and hardware, sometimes alone but often with friends, with a particular interest in simulation, collective knowledge and infrastructural systems.

They met at a Dirty Electronics event in 2015 and went on to perform together. Collaboration on MORE ROAR! began back in 2023 sharing code and giving MORE ROAR! workshops at festivals. Their lives at various stages have orbited around Leicester, UK.

The MORE ROAR! Synth launch will be at @avaloncafebermondsey, London, SE14 5RW, 15 May. All welcome!

https://dirtyelectronics.org https://soup.agnescameron.info

Music from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shifted: Music from the Augmented Instruments Lab

On Monday May 12th join us for a FREE Augmented Instruments Lab concert with performances from lab members Francisco Bernardo, Adam Schmitt, & Matt Davison, Jordie Shier & Xiaowan Yi, Brittney Allen, and June Kuhn

🎹🎸🥁🎻🎺🎷🪕📯🪇🪈🪗🪘🎛️🎚️

Piehouse Coop, Railway Arches, 213-214 Edward St, London SE8 5HD Closest Station: New Cross, Deptford 12 May, 19.00 Get your FREE ticket here

if you have trouble finding the location DM us on Instagram @augmentedinstrumentslab 📩

The Piehouse Co-op is fully step-free accessible

Concert organised by June Kuhn

AIL Open Seminars #005

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Join us for the latest in our AIL Open Seminars series! This talk will be hybrid, in-person at Imperial College London (Dyson School of Design Engineering) and live-streamed on our YouTube Channel.

For this seminar we are excited to welcome Zeynep Bulut, a voice and sound theorist and a Lecturer in Music at SARC, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at Queen’s University Belfast. Her first book, titled, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (London: Goldsmiths Press, 2024), explores the emergence, embodiment and mediation of voice as skin. Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. She is project lead for the research platform, Music, Arts, Health, and Environment, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account at QUB. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video, and theatre, and released two singles. Her composer profile has been featured by British Music Collection. She is a certified practitioner of Deep Listening.

This talk draws on Bulut’s larger research project, titled, Sustainable Speech, which has been supported by the Engaged Research Seed Fund at Queen’s University Belfast.

Title: Sustainable Speech: Experimental Music and Sensory Technologies for Post-Stroke Aphasia
Time: 11am UK time (GMT+1), Friday, June 21st, 2024
URL: YouTube Livestream

If you are in London and would like to join in-person please email l.morrison@imperial.ac.uk for directions

Abstract
In this talk, I will discuss the notion of sustainable speech drawing on digital and sensory technologies devised for post-stroke aphasia together with the conceptions of embodied voice in experimental music. By sustainable speech, I refer to empowerment to speak both within and beyond the bounds of language, rather than a linguistic, semantic or vocal fluency. Cognitive psycholinguistic and functional approaches describe aphasia as a “breakdown of information processing and linguistic abilities” deriving from a brain injury or trauma (Valletta and Barrett 2018). In a different context, amid social traumas, disintegration and mobility, early to mid-twentieth century avant-garde and experimental music practices employ the breakdown of language as a social commentary and an aesthetic modality. Whilst performing a metaphor and abstraction, the breakdown of language in these practices underlines the malleable, embodied, and cross-sensory aspects of voice and language, and leads to an ecological understanding of speech. This ecological understanding, I argue, expands on both verbal and non-verbal forms of expression, and provides critical and creative tools for dismantling the normative limits of linguistic, semantic and vocal fluency as well as the notion of rehabilitation for functional speech.

In pursuit of this idea, I will cross-read creative and functional technologies employed for recovering speech and language, including digital voice assistants, smart phone and tablet applications, wearable electronics and assistive music devices. I will address some of these technologies (such as the TactusTherapy, Cuespeak, Throat Sensors developed by John Rogers at Northwestern University, and Soundbeam) in conversation with text and graphic scores, and tape and gesture-based performances in experimental music practices (such as Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations, and Mark Applebaum’s composition, Aphasia). With this cross-reading, the suggestion is to examine the ways in which experimental music practices may recover speech as an ongoing, open and changeable experience, in line with what scholar Jonathan Sterne calls, “impairment phenomenology” (Sterne 2021), and, whether or how “data-driven” devices such as the wearables and assistive music technologies can prompt “an art of living,” and a “technology of the self.” (Schüll 2019, DeNora 2000).

Music from the Augmented Instruments Laboratory

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This Friday 17th of November at the AIL we have a double-event invitation for you!

First, at 11am we have the third edition of our AIL Open Seminars, with the presentation “Living with a Digital Musical Instrument: Interface - Instrument - Practice - Pathway” given by composer and performer Iran Sanadzadeh from Monash University (Australia).

Later on, at 7pm, we are glad to invite you to the concert “Music from the Augmented Instruments Lab” to be held at the Film and Drama Studio, Arts Two at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End Campus. Iran Sanadzadeh and composer and improviser Jeff Snyder (Princeton University) will be our guest performers. We will also have performances by members of the AIL including:

Adan Benito and Teo Dannemann
Adam Barkley and Teresa Pelinski
Eevee Zayas-Garin
Andrea Martelloni

The Arts Two Building is on the east side of QMUL’s campus near Mile End tube station. To get there, enter campus from the gate near the Regent’s Canal and turn to the left. Drop us a line on the Contact page if you want more detailed directions.

AIL Open Seminars #003

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce the third edition of our open seminar series, that will be live-streamed on our YouTube Channel.

For this seminar, Iran Sanadzadeh will be joining us from Monash University (Australia). Iran is a composer, performer and the designer of the Terpsichora pressure-sensitive Floors. She is the Convenor of Composition and Music Technology at Monash University. Her work focuses on new possibilities of expression that an extended relationship with newly designed instruments can offer. Iran performs primarily on her set of floors, developed initially from the study of the pioneering work of Australian dancer Philippa Cullen. She has been continuing the development of the Floors since 2015 in collaboration with composer Sebastian Collen. The Floors were a finalist in the 2023 Guthman Prize for Musical Instruments. Her music explores sculpting manifold parameters of sound with few levers of control. In slowly evolving music that marries synthesised round tones with manipulated sample control, her music shapes a textural evolution that invites deep listening to subtle sonic changes. Trade-offs made in performance with instruments, in negotiating limits of movement and materials shapes the slow evolution of soft sounds in Iran’s work.

Title: Living with a Digital Musical Instrument: Interface - Instrument - Practice - Pathway
Time: 11am, Friday, November 17th
URL: YouTube Livestream

If you are in London and would like to join in-person please email t.pelinskiramos at qmul.ac.uk

Abstract
Iran Sanadzadeh reflects on the shape of an ongoing musical practice on a digital musical instrument, through the lens of her Floors. The Terpsichora pressure-sensitive Floors are wooden platforms with sensors, with which Iran performs electronic music. As an instrument, the Floors are designed to allow many possibilities using few sensors, and encourage focused movements of the whole body in performance. She has recently released a solo album on the instrument; Ocean, Again, (PEOPLE SOUND June 2023) explores perception shift and control of small sonic changes in electronic music using movement. This presentation of the album as an LP, acousmatic and static, reveals the sonic practice of this instrument outside of the visual metaphor, instilling the movement into the sound and removing the interface. In this session, Iran examines the development of the Floors and the practice around them; she outlines the process of reshaping a performance away from an instrument based on the internalised physical relationship developed with it, and the two-way development of traditions and designs. She suspects that with enough perspectives considered, recorded music can show the physical processes behind its making and at a glance, before it is used for sound, the depth of an electronic instrument’s world is possible to glimpse.

AIL Open Seminars #002

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce the second edition of our open seminar series, that will be live-streamed on our YouTube Channel.

For this seminar, Anna-Kaisa Kaila will be joining us from the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden). Anna-Kaisa Kaila is a musicologist specialised in socio-cultural and legal study of arts. Her research explores the ethical, political and aesthetic impacts of technology on creative and cultural sectors and on artist communities, especially in the domain of music. Anna is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Technology at KTH in Stockholm (Sweden) at the department of Media and Interaction Design.

Title: Explorations in the ethics of creative-AI
Time: 11am, Friday, November 3rd
URL: YouTube Livestream

If you are in London and would like to join in-person please email t.pelinskiramos at qmul.ac.uk

Abstract
Ethically mindful development of creative-AI applications requires a broad understanding of the stakeholders involved, but we are still in the early days of mapping these uncertain terrains. In my talk, I will outline three recent studies on the stakeholders and ethics of creative-AI. First, we explored the material and conceptual framings of what it means to create art with AI tools in a series of interviews with Nordic AI-artists. I will deliver insight into our results, focusing on how artists describe their own motivations to adopt AI tools in their work. Secondly, critical case studies in music-AI tools, such as folk-rnn (Sturm et al. 2016) open perspectives to how heritage data use in AI training is entangled with questions of value and responsibility. Finally, I will introduce EASE, an analytical tool for ethical project evaluation and stakeholder elicitation for developers of creative-AI, and discuss our experiences with it in the context of music-AI applications.

Augmented Instruments Lab at the Science Museum

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Augmented Instruments Lab will be presenting five digital and acoustic-electronc instruments at the Science Museum Music Lates event on Thursday 19 October:

The magnetic resonator piano is an electromagnetically augmented acoustic grand piano created by lab director Andrew McPherson. The MRP has been used in dozens of compositions and performances, most recently in a series of shows by Arca at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City.

Bessel’s Trick by Franco Caspe is a Neural Audio Plugin for fast, live Tone Transformation of Musical Instrument sounds using Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis. The plugin does not use MIDI to control the synth. Instead, it works in an audio to audio fashion, using deep learning and signal processing to transform the sounds in real time.

Eevee Zayas-Garín will be exhibiting demos of their instrument NEP7UNO and a stringless guitar-like instrument they built for their PhD research. While both instruments use capacitive touch sensors, the former is an FM synth interface Eevee uses for live performance and the latter is an accessibility research product exploring the technical and cultural boundaries of guitar.

Lia Mice will present a new version of her award-winning Chaos Bells instrument, a 2-meter tall instrument that can produce percussive and drone-like sounds.

Entrance to the Science Museum Music Lates is free but registration is required. The lab demos will be on the 3rd floor of the museum.

AIL Open Seminars #001

Thu, 28 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We’re excited to announce a series of open seminars that will be live-streamed on our YouTube Channel.

For our first seminar, Eliot Bates will be joining us from The Graduate Center (City University of New York) on October 6th. Eliot Bates is an ethnographer who researches the interface between people and sound/music technologies, and they will be speaking on their recent work on modular synthesizers and the cultures surrounding them.

Title: Interfacing Gear Cultures: A Critical Organology of Modular Synthesis
Time: 11am, Friday, October 6th
URL: YouTube Livestream

If you are in London and would like to join in-person please email j.m.shier at qmul.ac.uk

Abstract
Modular synthesizers, a family of technological objects that when assembled constitute bespoke musical instruments, have existed since the 1950s but gained widespread popularity in the 2000s. Obsolete, expensive, bulky, temperamental, difficult to use, and often struggling to produce a compelling musical sound, it would seem to be a mystery why today there would be any interest in hardware modular synthesizers. A critical organology of these objects aims to situate them as sociocultural actors, and to understand the differential ways that they serve in social formations. One key flashpoint concerns instrumental interfaces, where what begins as an individual problem (the ludic potential imparted by a module’s look coupled with the knob’s haptic response) quickly becomes a social problem (the main glue of message forum and Discord channel discussions). Departing from prior critical organology studies, as I will show, the “music” produced with modular synthesizers is a far less significant factor in producing social effects than their status as gear: as a particular class of fetishized objects that mediate power relations within networks of conspicuous consumption.

Bio
Eliot Bates (they/them), Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at The Graduate Center (City University of New York), is an ethnographer who researches the interface between people and sound/music technologies—including their design, materiality, instrumentality, and cultural milieus. An ethnomusicologist by training (Ph.D., UC Berkeley), from 2004-2016 they researched these within Istanbul’s recording studios, instrument-building factories and music industries. Since 2013, their work has geographically broadened to consider European and North American gear cultures. Gear: Cultures of Music and Audio Technologies, co-authored with Samantha Bennett, will come out next year on MIT Press, and Eliot is currently writing a book on post-1995 modular synthesis gear cultures. In parallel to this textual ethnographic work, Eliot continues to be active in studio-based creative work, whether collaborative recordings featuring the oud, or microtonal makam-based electronic music productions as the artist Makamqore and as half of the duo Manifestoon Platoon. They have contributed, as either performer, composer, or recordist/engineer, to more than 90 albums produced in the US, UK, Turkey and Italy, as well as several TV series and feature films.

Music Software Accessibility Symposium

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As part of the AHRC-funded Bridging the Gap research project, the Augmented Instruments Lab and Performance without Barriers research group at Queen’s University Belfast are hosting a one-day event in London on the subject of understanding and improving blind and visually impaired (VIB) access to music technology. The aim of the event is to share the work done so far by ourselves and others, but importantly to generate discussion and ideas on where this work may go in the future. The event, taking place 17 November 2022 at Iklectik Art Lab, features panel discussions, keynote presentations and technology demonstrations of the latest accessible technology.

Presentations, panels and activities taking place are as follows:

An overview of the Bridging the Gap Research Project, given by Alex Lucas, Jacob Harrison and James Cunningham
A keynote presentation from Scott Chesworth, a key figure in the development of the Osara accessibility extension for Reaper, and a contributor to the Reaper Access online community.
Talks from representatives from two organisations: Sound without Sight and UCAN productions, to discuss ways they are supporting VIB people to access music technology and the creative arts.
A panel discussion, hosted by James Cunningham, with the guests of the Bridging the Gap podcast sharing their perspectives on VIB access to music technology.
Accessible digital audio workstation (DAW) demonstrations given by Jason Dasent, Andre Louis, Scott Chesworth and Bryan Matthews. They will demonstrate accessible workflows in Pro Tools, Logic, Reaper and GarageBand for iOS. Andre will also demonstrate Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol with Native Access.
A design workshop, using Lego parts, to build low-fidelity prototypes of possible new (or old) technologies that may improve VIB DAW access.
A keynote presentation from Professor Chi Kim, who will speak about his work on the Flo Tools accessibility extension and a recent collaboration with Avid to improve the accessibility of Sibelius.
A panel discussion with representatives from Focusrite, Ableton and Creative United, on initiatives within the music technology industry to improve VIB access.
A closing live music performance and open mic stage

Further information and schedule can be found on the Performance without Barriers event page.

(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash)