The Team
Dr Zubin Kanga
DIRECTOR & PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, and technologist. For over a decade, he has been at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes that seek to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
In 2020, Kanga was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multi-year project Cyborg Soloists, based at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Senior Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. Cyborg Soloists is unlocking new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals and VR, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments. His Cyborg Soloists work was recently featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, and Limelight Magazine.
Zubin has premiered more than 150 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Festival Présences (France), Time of Music (Finland), Klang Festival (Denmark), PODIUM Festival (Germany), and November Music (Netherlands).
As a composer, Kanga’s output includes Dead Leaves for piano and live electronics, which was selected to represent Australia at the International Rostrum of Composers in 2018; Spider Web Castle for viola and piano, which he premièred with Brett Dean at Extended Play Festival; and Steel on Bone, which he premiered at hcmf//, featuring MiMU multi-sensor gloves morphing the sounds of extended techniques inside the piano, which The Times praised for its ‘bravura and madness’.
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using a KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; Neil Luck’s Whatever Weighs You Down, using MiMU sensor gloves to interact with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura; and Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET (performed 30 times across 9 countries as well as the BBC World Service) as well as a new collaboration with Schubert, Steady State, that will use EEG brain sensors to control sound and light.
Biography current to August 2023
Dr Jonathan Packham
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Jonathan Packham is a composer and researcher with interests in a variety of contemporary experimental music and sonic arts. He completed a DPhil in Music at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford in 2021, supported by an AHRC DTP studentship.
Some of his recent compositions include a tetralogy of club-adjacent releases under his electronic alias SALINGER via EXPO, pavilion lovesong number 1, commissioned by SONCITIES, and SLOWLY SHRINKING WORLDS, commissioned by trombonist Sebastiaan Kemner. In 2020 he won the EMPRES Award for Experimental Electronic Music for his collaborative composition FISSION, co-written with producer Xactus. Since late 2016 he has been experimenting with live-generated video scores in virtual environments using VR headset technologies, as exemplified in 2019’s SECRET ANIMALS.
Jonathan has published writing on experimental music and sonic art, both in peer-reviewed academic journals Leonardo and TEMPO and in an essay collection titled Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice II convened by Theatrum Mundi.
Alongside his research position with Cyborg Soloists, Jonathan is Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.
Biography current to August 2023
Caitlin Rowley
RESEARCH ADMINISTRATOR & EVENTS CO-ORDINATOR
Caitlin Rowley is a composer-performer and artist. Her work is playful and interdisciplinary, often incorporating video, drawing or theatrical elements. She often creates scores which are art objects (notably Community of Objects and Fortune Favours the Brave), and much of her recent work combines her background in new media with her composition and art practices, resulting in pieces such as HAYDN SPACE OPERA (a virtual reality piece) and Walks (audiovisual artworks created with artists Katie Hanning and Jon England).
Caitlin’s work has been performed, broadcast and exhibited internationally, at venues and festivals including King’s Place, the Barbican, Royal Academy of Arts, Brisbane Powerhouse, hcmf//, Spor Festival, and the NOW now Festival of Spontaneous Music. Her recent commissions include pieces for Aldeburgh Festival and Electric Medway Festival.
Caitlin holds degrees in composition (University of Sydney, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) and design (University of Technology, Sydney). She is currently (2023) completing her doctoral research entangling private and public creative spaces through interdisciplinary composition, at Bath Spa University under the supervision of composer James Saunders and artist Robert Luzar.
Caitlin is a member of the acclaimed composer-performer group Bastard Assignments, with whom she creates and performs experimental music internationally.
Biography current to August 2023
Dr Mark Dyer
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT, 2021-23
Mark Dyer is a composer of experimental concert and installation music. His work explores the entanglement between borrowed material and narrative.
Mark has worked with ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, EXAUDI and House of Bedlam, as well as soloists Kate Ledger, Kathryn Williams and Jason Alder. He has attended several international residencies, including the 2019 Bilkent Composition Academy, the 2018 Defragmentation research project at the Darmstadt New Music Summer School, and the 2018 UKYA Cornish Weekender.
Mark completed a practice-based PhD in Composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in 2021, supported by an AHRC North West Consortium DTP studentship.
Biography current to August 2023
