The Digital Music Theranostics Lab hosted the first Music and Acoustics Research Centre (MARC) Open Day 12-6pm on Monday, 22 June 2026, featuring distinguished lectures by Anna Huang, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor of Music and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and Roger Dannenberg, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Art & Music at Carnegie-Mellon University, presentations by members of the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Programme, and interactive music physiology AI sound demos by MARC member labs.
The event was a satellite event of the New Instruments for Musical Expression (NIME) Conference, which brought the international music technology community to London. The student chairs of the open day were Natalia Cotic, Ananth Venkatesh, Ege Erdem, and Wentao Hao from the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences and the Department of Engineering.
12-2pm at the Digital Music Theranostics Lab in the James Clerk Maxwell Building
The Open Day started at 12noon with an open (physiological) data collection session with Hilary Sturt (violin), Ian Pressland (cello), and Elaine Chew (piano) performing the Modéré (first movement) from Ravel’s Piano Trio with real-time visualisation of performers’ ECG, respiration, and heart rate variability followed by a Q&A.
The Audio Lab presented immersive and mixed reality audio demonstrations in the form of a steerable surround sound system developed at King’s, a MagicBeans advanced acoustic simulation with head-tracking headphones (a collaboration with Gareth Llewellyn and The Third Orchestra supported by King’s Culture Creative Practice Catalyst Fund), and a sound bar demo.
King’s AI+ Fellow Robert Laidlow showed the stacco instrument and his use of live AI to melt timbres together and control live-processed sound as used in his compositions.
2:30-6pm in St David’s Room in the King’s Building
The second part of the day took place across the Thames at St David’s Room in the King’s Building, chaired by Robert Laidlow and Mark Gotham. There, Anna Huang gave a Distinguished Lecture entitled, “In Search of Human-AI Resonance”.
Anna’s talk was followed by three presentations by MIT graduate students Kimaya Lecamwasam on “Understanding Listener Perceptions of AI and Human-Composed Music in Emotional Applications”, Heidi Lei on “Gesture Controlled Systems for Live Piano Jamming”, and a performance of Hindustani vocal music by Nithya Shikharpur on “The Moving Drone”.
Next, Mark Gotham gave a very short introduction to other MARC labs, followed by Roger Dannenberg’s Distinguished Lecture entitled, “Score Following and Alignment as Optimal Partitioning”
Like all good open days, it ended with a gathering at the pub.
Acknowledgements
The inaugural MARC Open Day was supported in part by the NMES Research Culture Fund and the Information Processing Systems Group ROIS Fund.
