Archives: 27th May 2023

From 31 May to 3 June, several C4DM researchers will participate in the 2023 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2023). Once again, this year’s edition will have Bela as an official sponsor.

Below is a list of all the publications authored or co-authored by C4DM members:

• Instructions not included: Dementia Friendly approaches to DMI Design by Jon Pigrem, Jennifer Macritchie, and Andrew McPherson
• SketchSynth: a browser-based sketching interface for sound control by Sebastian Löbbers and György Fazekas
• Interactive Neural Resonators by Rodrigo Diaz, Charalampos Saitis, and Mark Sandler
• Music jamming as a participatory design method. A case study with disabled musicians by Teodoro Dannemann
• The Sabotaging Piano: key-to-pitch remapping as a source of new techniques in piano improvisation by Teodoro Dannemann and Nick Bryan-Kinns
• Self-Sabotage Workshop: a starting point to unravel sabotaging of instruments as a design practice by Teodoro Dannemann, Nick Bryan-Kinns, Andrew McPherson
• Sabotaging Piano Concert (Music Submission) by Teodoro Dannemann
• Exploring the (un)ambiguous guitar: A Qualitative Study on the use of Gesture Disambiguation in Augmented Instrument Design by Adan L. Benito Temprano, Teodoro Dannemann, and Andrew P. McPherson
• Pipeline for recording datasets and running neural networks on the Bela embedded hardware platform by Teresa Pelinski, Rodrigo Diaz, Adan L. Benito Temprano, Andrew McPherson

The following workshop is co-organised by C4DM members:

• Querying Experience with Musical Interaction Workshop by Courtney N. Reed, Eevee Zayas-Garin, and Andrew McPherson

Happy NIMEing!

Andrea Martelloni, an AIM student won third prize at the 25th Guthman Musical Instrument Competition held at Georgia Tech, Atlanta on 11th March 2023!

Andrea presented the HITar, an augmented guitar supporting percussive playing with the help of a DNN gesture classifier and physical modelling provided by PRISM Labs’s MetaSynth. The project was supervised by Dr Mathieu Barthet and Prof Andrew McPherson. The HiTAR is an augmented instrument that uses an acoustic guitar as its base and has embedded sensors to capture a performer’s gestures and hits. The body of the guitar and the captured gestures of the player are connected using machine learning, and the sound from striking the body is transformed to resemble sounds on different surfaces like metal or glass. This allows the performer to organically explore additional gestures and sounds to accompany the traditional performance of a guitar.

Also present at the competition finals was C4DM’s Lia Mice with her Chaos Bells, a large instrument she designed with Andrew McPherson during her Media and Arts Technology PhD.

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition was originally designed to identify the next generation of musical instrumentalists, It has turned into one of the only competitions and events dedicated to identifies next-generation musical instruments and the best new ideas in musicality, design, and engineering. It is at hosted by the School of Music at Georgia Tech, Atlanta-USA. This year’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition featured nine finalists from six countries and the result is an event that exposes new technologies and novel ideas to a community of musicians who are natural experimenters.

You can see the video presentation of the HITar here, and you can watch the public performance of all the contestants on Georgia Tech’s YouTube channel.

James Bolt one of the AIM CDT 2022 cohort student won the Synth Design Hackathon and was invited to present the project (video below) at Superbooth in Berlin (Germany).

FranKnitStein – A repurposed sewing machine for ambient sound production by James Bolt (AIM CDT) in collaboration with Teodoro Dannemann (MAT CDT) was one of two winners in the Synth Design Hackathon back in February.

The project utilised a hand cranked sewing machine and a mechanical hand. The main aim was to use as many of the mechanical motions of the sewing machine as possible. The addition of a mechanical hand not only added to the visual interest but also provided a different playing style.

James and Teo added three main sound producing techniques all linked to the motion of the sewing machine.

More information and a video of the instrument at

FranKnitStein // Synthesizer by James Bolt + Teodoro Dannemann + // Synthux Academy