A pianist on stage wears a brain-sensor headset that translates neural activity into live electronic sound, while a second musician plays a digital instrument that has no physical form. This project, led by Zubin Kanga, tackles a persistent gap: music technology researchers and performing artists rarely collaborate, so cutting-edge digital tools—from AI sound generators to gesture-controlled instruments—remain inaccessible to most musicians. The renewal phase expands this work into a dedicated research centre at Royal Holloway, producing 18 new interdisciplinary works and at least 15 international performances. If successful, the project could reshape how musicians integrate rapidly evolving technologies into live performance, making tools like biosensors and spatial audio a standard part of the creative toolkit rather than niche experiments. It also aims to make these technologies more inclusive, opening new avenues for practitioners and audiences who are currently excluded. For the UK music industry, which faces pressure to stay internationally competitive, this work directly feeds innovation in digital instruments, software, and performance practice—sectors that quietly underpin the creative economy.
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Cyborg Soloists is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship project led by Zubin Kanga that is transforming the use of digital technologies in the performing arts. It explores the frontiers of interactions between musicians and digital technologies through collaborations between leading artists, researchers, and industry partners. Combining practice research integrating music technology, new technological tools for musicians, and new extensions to music-technologies that are currently in their infancy, it is advancing the UK’s position as an artistic and technological innovator and generating impacts that are benefitting the UK’s music industry, audiences and creative digital economy. This project is unique in bringing together researchers from two contrasting fields: practice-based researchers and music technology innovators. Via collaborations that straddle this interdisciplinary divide, Cyborg Soloists is leading the development of new approaches to musicians’ interactions with new digital instruments, biosensors, (including brain-sensors), spatial and location-based sound, gesture instruments, AI-generated sound and images, and audio-visual interactions. Cyborg Soloists addresses major challenges facing the UK’s research and music industry communities: the lack of collaboration between music technology researchers and artist-researchers, difficulties musicians face in accessing and integrating rapidly changing technologies into their practice, and the UK music industry’s need for greater innovation and integration with music technology to ensure its continuing international competitiveness. The project addresses these challenges and opportunities through interdisciplinary collaborative research with an international network of leading musicians, technologists and 26 Project Partners. The renewal phase will continue the successful plans of Years 1–4, building on groundbreaking research into the use of bio-sensors and new digital instruments, while expanding to include new/expanded workstreams and new Partner technologies with a particular focus on AI, audio-visual interactions and spatial sound. The objectives are as follows: To expand Cyborg Soloists into a Centre for Research in Interdisciplinary Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, bringing together teams of artists, arts organisations, music technology researchers, and music technology companies, to develop the next generation of technologically-enhanced interdisciplinary music works. To create new works that develop innovative approaches to cutting-edge instruments and digital tools, including AI-generated music, new digital instruments, technological extensions of the body (including gesture sensors and brain sensors), new modes of audio-visual interaction, new approaches to spatialised sound, and new uses of retro technologies, in collaborations with artist-researchers, 26 Project Partners, music technology researchers, and collaborators at Royal Holloway, including AHRC CoSTAR National Lab researchers. To share innovations widely to maximise impact on musicians, the music industry, the music technology industry, and music audiences, through the creation of practice-based, technological and published research outputs as well as extensive public engagement. To explore how these technological innovations can make musical experiences more inclusive and accessible to practitioners, audiences, students and communities. To become a global leader in practice research involving interactions between musicians and new technologies, and in the integration of this research into international music industry practice. Through the production of 18 new interdisciplinary music works, at least 15 international performances across the UK, Europe, Canada and Australia, a book, 7 journal articles, 5 conference papers, 8 software patches/applications, 12 concert films, a documentary, two conferences, and wide engagement with media and Project Partners, the renewal of Cyborg Soloists will generate impacts on musicians, the music industry, music industry policy, music technology companies and researchers, audiences, diverse communities, and the wider creative industries.
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