An Infrastructure for Sharing Approaches to Innovative Technologies in Contemporary Music

Cyborg Soloists is a UKRI-funded Future Leaders Fellowship project led by Dr Zubin Kanga. Based at Royal Holloway, University of London, the project connects composers, performers, and sound artists with music technology researchers and industry partners to develop collaborative artistic and technological innovations, producing creative, musicological, and technological research outputs. Cyborg Soloists’ previous research has mostly evaluated approaches to technological innovation in contemporary music within single collaborative works, but we are now analysing connections between these diverse new works. This chapter explores the larger challenges facing a project of this type: how to design projects that improve the design of new instruments and technological tools, how to innovate new approaches to composition and performance utilising these technologies, and how to negotiate the wider disseminative infrastructures relevant to our industry partners. This chapter takes as its focus two technologies whose research infrastructures and contexts are quite different: the MiMU Gloves and Vochlea’s Dubler 2. Our aim is not to present these examples as representative of Cyborg Soloists in its entirety, but rather to demonstrate the breadth of the project and to showcase particular issues that have arisen. Evaluating works by Neil Luck, Zubin Kanga, and Rylan Gleave that employ the MiMU Gloves demonstrates how Cyborg Soloists as a research infrastructure has facilitated the production of innovative artistic work alongside facilitating new technological developments by companies like MiMU. Evaluating a commission by Jessie Marino using Dubler 2—a voice-to-MIDI interface—demonstrates how we have sought to negotiate, accommodate, and integrate industry partner Vochlea’s multifaceted commercial and compositional interests alongside our own research agenda. Finally, we reflect on broader infrastructural considerations pertaining to future Cyborg Soloists collaborations with a widening network of artists, arts organisations, research centres, charities, and industry partners.