On November 22, Dr Zubin Kanga (Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts) returns to perform at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the UK’s largest international festival of new and experimental music.
Zubin Kanga (credit Mihai Cucu)
Zubin's solo performance features new and recently commissioned works exploring new ways of extending the piano with interactive electronics, including works created as part of his current UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship research project, Cyborg Soloists.
It includes Georgia Rodgers’ Ringinglow, which explores the psycho-acoustic effects of combining the piano with slowly forming and overlapping sine tones; Laurence Osborn’s Absorber, which pairs the piano with 80s retro-synthesizer sounds in double keyboard hyper-virtuosity; Simon Steen-Andersen’s newly revised version of Pretty Sound (Up and Down) which combines new microphone techniques and a wide variety of specially commissioned performance tools, converting the piano into a shapeshifting electrified percussion instrument; and Zubin Kanga’s own work Steel on Bone, inspired by the contrasting delicacy and violence of surgery and swordplay, delves into body of the piano using steel tools, transmogrifying these interior sounds using (Cyborg Soloists industry partner) MiMU’s multi-sensor gloves.
This recital comes between, Dr Kanga’s performances at Music Current Festival in Dublin, and at Kontraklang in Berlin, also featuring a variety of new works for piano and multimedia. These are the first of many performance research outputs as part of Cyborg Soloists, which feature new works extending live musicians with new technologies including bio-sensors, newly designed digital instruments, VR, projection mapping, AI/machine learning, and robotics.
