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February 25, 2026

Making instruments for imaginary bands

21-22 April 2026

Artists, technologists and makers are invited to take part in a speculative workshop to dream fictional bands up, along with their musical imaginaries, and build the instruments they play.

Making inconceivable instruments for impossible bands.
Speculating collectively to escape the music tools and procedures we’ve grown used to.
Subverting the ways we think of musical tools to reveal the influence of musical discourse and immaginaries.

Does this sound fun? Please, join us!

Application Deadline April 12

Please complete the form below to join the workshop - Places are limited to a maximum of 25 participants.

Let’s Make a Band Application Form

The workshop will be held at Imperial College London - South Kensington campus, London.

Piano Activities, International Festival of the Newest Music at Weisbaden Festum Fluxorum, 1962

Organiser
Let’s make a band

Let’s Make a Band is a hands-on, playful and critical workshop exploring how music discourse and technology shape each other. Participants collaboratively invent fictional — possibly improbable — bands, complete with genre, aesthetic, member personas, and the cultural worlds they inhabit. From there, the focus shifts to the instruments: what would this band actually play, and how would sound, bodies, and technologies relate within their invented musical world?

The premise is simple but provocative: what happens when we invent a discourse that doesn’t exist yet, and build instruments from that? By sidestepping familiar music-technology categories like controller, mapping, or sound generator, the workshop treats instrument design as something that emerges from social discourse rather than technical convention.

The workshop draws on speculative and participative design, persona methodologies, and Dalcroze eurhythmics, and is conceived to foreground the situated knowledge and experiences participants bring into the room. Participants sketch, prototype, and perform - treating instruments as dynamic, interdependent matters rather than fixed objects - culminating in a short presentation showcasing newly built instruments.

This event is part of DECODMI (Discovering Education in Communities of Digital Musical Instruments), an MSCA-funded research project. The designed artefacts and the reflections around them may contribute to generating methodological intuitions, heuristics or provocative statements to be shared with broader research communities. Outcomes, ranging from methods to design processes, will be disseminated through academic publications with a strong multidisciplinary outreach.

Workshop structure and resources

Preparation task: participants are asked to bring a prompt - an object, fabric, sound recording, drawing, word, or any other small token - that resonates with the imaginary band they dream about. It should feel like a fragment of the world their band might belong to. The prompt serves as a starting point for collective imagination, a creative anchor that helps ground the speculation and open up the world of the band.

The tools and materials provided to the participants will include:

  • basic prototype materials (e.g. cardboard, cardboard, foam, cork, wire, tape, string, paper, plastic bottles, elastic bands, metal tins, balloons, hot glue, zip ties, velcro, binder clips, staples, aluminium foil, markers, stickers, buttons)
  • textile materials (e.g. conductive wires, fabrics, leather)
  • basic circuitry and sensors
  • Bela maker platform (to be returned at the end of the workshop)

If needed, participants are encouraged to bring any particular tool or material (subject to communication with the organising committee - see Application Form above) and use any open-source or free resource. We will not be able to reimburse any expanse (e.g. travel or accommodation) for accepted participants.

From the initial gathering of ideas to the final presentation of artefacts, core elements of the event will be collaboration and mutual support. The organising committee will try its best to welcome and make everyone comfortable. Cordiality and sharing are therefore expected from all participants as well.

George Brecht, Chemistry of Music, 1969 - fluxusisland.org ___

Some Useful References & Links



Front images credits:

Charlotte Moorman performed John Cage’s “26′1.1499″ for a String Player” in Chicago in 1969.



The workshop is supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101150317 (“DECODMI”) hosted at the University of Genoa.