Grants

The RUDIMENTS grant has been instrumental in supporting the Augmented Instruments Lab’s work in exploring the next generation of digital musical instruments. This funding enables us to push the boundaries of design and technology, focusing on creating instruments that enhance the sensory experience of music-making. We are incredibly grateful for the support from RUDIMENTS, as it allows us to continue our groundbreaking research, challenge traditional assumptions, and develop innovative tools that shape the future of music and interaction.

This joint academic-industrial research project helped create a new generation of embedded hardware tools for creating real-time audio systems. Its three core areas were the investigation of embedded architectures for high-bandwidth signal processing; AI-based strategies for making sense of rich real-time audio and sensor data; and approaches to making music computing accessible to makers with a broad range of expertise.

Bridging the Gap was an AHRC-funded collaboration with Queen’s University Belfast (PI Franziska Schroeder), with a companion project funded by Ableton AG, studying the barriers faced by visually-impaired users of music production software. Through workshops, interviews, ethnographic study and design exercises, the team looked at how music software could be more accessible and equitable.

Design for Virtuosity was an EPSRC fellowship exploring the relationship between instrument technologies and human sensorimotor skills. The fellowship looked at how we can design new instruments which repurpose the existing expertise of trained musicians. It also examined the factors that promote accessibility, longevity and sustainability in musical instrument design.

The EPSRC Hackable Instruments project explored the ways that performers creatively repurpose and “misuse” technology, asking how we could design digital instruments which are as open to unexpected uses as the acoustic and analog instruments of previous eras. The project led to the commercial spinout Bela.io, producing high-performance embedded hardware systems for working with sound and sensors.