Zubin Kanga

Motion-sensor-controlled live electronics, AI, and more! Exploring the interaction between a live musician and new technologies.

Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer, improviser and technologist. His work in recent years has focused on new models of interaction between a live musician and new technologies, including motion-sensor-controlled live electronics, AI, reinterpretations of cinema history, live-generated 3D visuals, analogue synthesizers, new interactive instruments, magnetic resonators, stop-motion animation, keyboards as video-game-style controllers, motion and bio-sensors, interactive live-video, and internet-based scores.

Zubin has performed at many international festivals and international venues including the BBC Proms, London Contemporary Music Festival, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival (UK) Melbourne Festival (Australia), Festival Présences (France), Klang Festival (Denmark), Podium Festival (Germany), Resonator Festival (Sweden), November Music (Netherlands), CUBE, Graz (Austria), and Borealis Festival (Norway).

Recent and upcoming collaborations include those with Alexander Schubert on his internet-based WIKI-PIANO.NET, which has been performed in 22 cities, with Neil Luck on Panopticon, using MiMu sensor gloves and collaborating with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura in a work exploring media created for people with visual and hearing impairments, and with Philip Venables on an upcoming concert-length piano and multimedia exploring the life of artist David Wojnarowicz, and his experience of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York.

After graduating from the University of Sydney and the Royal Academy of Music, Zubin was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Nice and IRCAM (Paris) and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is now Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts. He is also the director of Cyborg Soloists, a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship-funded project exploring new music-technology collaborations between artists and industry.