Zubin Kanga is a pianist, composer and technologist, currently undertaking a major music-technology research project, Cyborg Soloists
For over a decade, Zubin has been at the forefront of curating and creating interdisciplinary musical programmes that seek to explore and redefine what it means to be a performer through interactions with new technologies.
In 2020, following his appointment as Lecturer in Musical Performance and Digital Arts at Royal Holloway University, Zubin was awarded a £1.4 million UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship to fund his latest multiyear project Cyborg Soloists, which is unlocking new possibilities in composition and performance through interactions with AI and machine learning, interactive visuals and VR, motion and biosensors, and new hybrid instruments. As Principal Investigator and Director, his Cyborg Soloists work was recently featured in The New York Times, The Wire, Classical Music Magazine, and Limelight Magazine.
Zubin has premiered more than 150 works and performed at many international festivals including the BBC Proms, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, London Contemporary Music Festival (UK); Melbourne Festival (Australia); Festival Présences, Paris Autumn Festival (France); Time of Music (Finland); Klang Festival (Denmark); PODIUM Festival (Germany); Gaudeamus Festival and November Music (Netherlands).
Recent collaborations include Philip Venables’ Answer Machine Tape, 1987, which explores the AIDS crisis through a crucial week in the life of New York artist David Wojnarowicz, using a KeyScanner to allow the piano to type text onto the screen like a typewriter; Neil Luck’s Whatever Weighs You Down, using MiMU sensor gloves to interact with deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura; and Alexander Schubert’s internet-based score WIKI-PIANO.NET. This was performed 30 times across nine countries, including the BBC World Service. Zubin is also working on a new research collaboration with Schubert, Steady State, that will use EEG brain sensors to control sound and light.