October 18, 2023

Augmented Instruments Lab at the Science Museum

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.