Pianist, composer and technologist Zubin Kanga performs groundbreaking new music from his Cyborg Soloists project that fuses classical virtuosity with cutting-edge technologies, combining the piano with hybrid instruments, digital avatars, synthesizers, body sensors and experimental AI.

The centrepiece is a monumental newwork by visionary composer George Lewis, who has been combining interactive AI systems and live musicians for over 45 years. Blombos Playground is anew milestone in his decades of human-computer innovation, combining Kanga’s live keyboardist with two AI improvising systems, Voyager and Somax.

Voyager is Lewis’s iconic interactive software system which he has been continuously developing over four decades. It responds to the live performer like a natural improvisor with its own unique personality. Somax, a machine-learning-based system developed atIRCAM in Paris, has been trained on Kanga’s improvisations to become a kind of improvisingAI doppelgänger. In Blombos Playground, the two systems are combined as SoVo,a new hybrid AI improvising system, performing and improvising with Kanga on three virtual keyboard instruments swirling across multiple speakers, in a breathtaking dialogue between real and virtual creativity.

Nwando Ebizie’s I Will Fix Myself(Just Circles) explores the influence of Chopin’s technique on Zubin’s relationship to the piano, combining interview materials and AI voices with the piano, a synthesizer and complex Afrofuturist electronic textures.

In Alex Paxton’s Cuddley Wuddley, everyday experiences become whimsical studies expanding the piano with a keyboard playing sampled choirs, drums, birds and cooking utensils.

And Ben Nobuto’s The Art of Sinking takes the loneliness and anxiety of a pianist preparing for a performance and explodes their inner monologue onto the stage in a virtuosic duet between thepianist and a digital avatar.

Performed on piano, ROLI Seaboard, video and electronics, it draws together the pianistic bravura of Liszt and Ravel with the glitchy rhythms of video game music.

All the music was commissioned or created as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University ofLondon. SoVo was created in 2025 by Marco Fiorini and Gérard Assayag atIRCAM, and George Lewis and Damon Holzborn at Columbia University.

‘Cyborg Pianist’ Zubin Kanga is at the forefront of creating, co-creating and performing groundbreaking interdisciplinary works that explore and redefine how musicians can interact with new technologies.

Programme:

Nwando Ebizie: IWill Fix Myself (Just Circles)

Alex Paxton: Selections fromCuddley Wuddley (UK premiere)

George Lewis:Blombos Playground (World Premiere)

Ben Nobuto: The Art ofSinking (London Premiere)

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