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 creating, co-creating and performing interdisciplinary music that seeks to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
Since 2021, he has been the Director and Research Lead of Cyborg Soloists, a 7-year music technology research project supported by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship and 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, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments. His Cyborg Soloists work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, The Guardian and Limelight Magazine, and regularly featured on BBC Radio and the BBC World Service.
Zubin has premiered more than 160 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Paris Autumn Festival (France), Time of Music (Finland), Music Current (Ireland), Klang Festival (Denmark), Hamburg International Music Festival (Germany), Gaudeamus Festival (Netherlands), Transit Festival (Belgium) and Modulus Festival (Canada).
In 2024-2025, he premiered 8 new concerti with ensembles including BCMG, Explore Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, Manchester Collective and the BBC Philharmonic. His recent albums featuring new works exploring cutting-edge technologies include Machine Dreams (Nonclassical) and Cyborg Pianist (NMC) as well as feature albums of composers Claudia Molitor (October House Records), Scott McLaughlin (Huddersfield Contemporary Records) and Simon Emmerson (NMC).
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which uses a KeyScanner to turn the piano into a hybrid audio-visual instrument, allowing it to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; 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, Steady State, that uses EEG brain sensors to control music and holographic AI visuals; the keyboard/piano concerto, Schiller’s Piano by Laurence Osborn, performed with Manchester Collective at the Southbank Centre in London, and TECHNO-UTOPIA a new concerto by Robert Laidlow which was recorded with the BBC Philharmonic, featuring an AI system modelled on the orchestra’s archives, performed with AI-integrated digital instruments.
Biography current to August 2025
Caitlin Rowley
RESEARCH CONTRACTS & KNOWLEDGE MANAGER
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).
She is a member of the acclaimed composer-performer group Bastard Assignments, with whom she creates and performs experimental music internationally.
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 (AU), hcmf//, Spor Festival (DK), and the NOW now Festival of Spontaneous Music (AU). Her recent solo commissions include pieces for Aldeburgh Festival and Electric Medway Festival, and she has also recently been commissioned with Bastard Assignments to create works for Borealis - a festival for experimental music (NO), Spor Festival (DK), Wigmore Hall, and Musik Installationen Nürnberg (DE).
Caitlin holds degrees in composition (University of Sydney, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) and design (University of Technology, Sydney). She is currently (2025) completing her PhD on entangling private and public creative spaces through interdisciplinary composition, at Bath Spa University under the supervision of composer James Saunders and artist Robert Luzar.
Biography current to July 2025
Dr Jonathan Packham
POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCH ASSISTANT, 2023-25
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.
Jonathan has published writing on experimental music and sonic art, both in peer-reviewed academic journals Leonardo, TEMPO, and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and in an essay collection titled Crafting a Sonic Urbanism: the Political Voice II convened by Theatrum Mundi.
Some of his recent compositions include ghost, premiered in January 2025, 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.
Alongside his research position with Cyborg Soloists, Jonathan is Departmental Lecturer in Music at the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.
Biography current to May 2025
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
