Augmented Instruments Laboratory

Description

The Augmented Instruments Laboratory is a music technology research team based in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London and the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. Founded in 2011, the lab brings together engineering, arts, humanities and social science perspectives to imagine new ways of making music. Musical instruments have always been a meeting point of technology, skill, aesthetics and culture: the lab creates new instruments and studies what they mean for the people who play them, and it also makes electronic and digital tools for instrument makers.

The lab takes inspiration from musicology, the humanities and HCI to understand the nexus between technology, culture and aesthetics, and, drawing on philosophy and science and technology studies (STS), it calls attention to the implicit values embedded in its tools and research methods. One strand of its research works with disabled musicians and community organisations to design accessible instruments which address the ways that traditional instruments exclude a significant segment of the musical population. The lab gets its designs into people's hands through open-source hardware and software, commercial spin-outs and long-term artistic collaborations, and it develops embedded computing tools such as Bela. It runs an open seminar series. Follow the lab on YouTube.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2011

Contact details

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University affiliation(s)

Queen Mary, University of London
London

Partner Universities

Imperial College London