Interview, Zubin Kanga - the 'cyborg pianist'

The idea of incorporating electric and electronic elements into piano playing is not that new; the very first such instruments date from the 1920s and the technology has been evolving ever since, with today's digital pianos offering a high level of fidelity to the traditional sound.

But to take the electronics out of the piano, and attach them to the pianist - that's a bit different. That's what Zubin Kanga's new album Cyborg Pianist does - the instrument itself remains as acoustic, pristine and untouched as any purist could wish for, but through the use of wearable electronics and synthesisers, Kanga takes its sound in a huge variety of exciting directions. I spoke to him about how this technology works, its limits and its potential, and some of the innovative works featured on the album.

The opening section of Laura Bowler’s SHOW(ti)ME is a pretty savage satire of our current moment’s social media landscape around performance and creativity. The flip side of that is that some of its most skewering references might not stand the test of time; do you think that’s a problem?

To some extent it's simply a piece of the moment, and about how people use social media now. To briefly explain for those that haven't heard it, the piece is to do with the contrast between musicians' private lives and public lives, and the public personas we have to create - either on social media or on stage. And contrasting that with our private anxieties about practising, obsessions around that.

So the social media stuff is definitely satirising how a lot of TikTok and Instagram influencers use it now, and some musicians do that kind of thing, and certainly we all have to project a particular persona. Perhaps the mode of delivery and the type of language might change over the next few years? It has been fairly constant over the last few years, but it could get even more extreme and in a few years it won't sound so outlandish!

Briefly (if that’s possible!), how do the MiMU sensor gloves that you’re using at various points on this album work – is it possible to use them at the same time as operating the piano’s keys?

The gloves go over the whole hand but leave your fingertips uncovered. There are sensors in the fingers and at each joint, so it can tell when that joint is bending. So it can identify most hand shapes with high precision. You actually use machine-learning initially to train it to recognise different gestures that you've put into it. You can recognise slightly different things - holding a finger up slightly straighter or slightly more bent, that sort of thing. Then you can take those gestures that you've 'taught' it and you can map them to various sounds and effects. It also has motion sensors in the wrist, which allow motion through the air to be used for controlling things; so you can make a particular sound with a given gesture, and then change and shape that sound by moving through the air, up and down or rolling the wrist in different directions.

All these technologies have been used separately before - I've used motion sensors for years. Ten years ago they had to be all connected up with wires but now it's wireless and the components are much smaller than they used to be. And the sensors in the joints, too, have been around for some time but it's now possible to integrate them into the glove. It works very well.

And yes, I am playing the piano while doing these. They do get slightly in the way, in that you don't normally play with gloves. The material's thin, but it's more than nothing. And I am playing quite difficult things here; the piece is actually referencing some Bartók at a point where I'm playing with the gloves! I can definitely play it, just maybe not quite at the top speed that I could without the gloves. I wouldn't do a whole concert wearing them.

I'm also talking to one of the researchers who works on the MiMU gloves about using some of the newer gesture-recognition technology that’s available online that just uses a webcam to recognise gestures. The limitation, of course, is that everything needs to be in front of a camera, whereas the great thing about the gloves is that you can move around the stage. You're not limited by where the camera is looking, so in those ways it's more freeing as a performer. There are different advantages.

What about the helmet that you're wearing in some of the publicity photos, that Daft Punk fans might find hauntingly familiar?

Laura is very theatrical - she's a singer, she's written an opera as well as performing plenty herself with her chamber opera company Size Zero Opera. She has a natural sense of theatre, and I think she wanted something to represent the fact that at this point the actual performance within the narrative of the piece is starting. That this thing I've been practising and preparing for and doing the social media posts for is now happening when I put on the helmet.

It doesn't do any of the MiMU stuff, it's just a prop. It's great to have these kinds of things - costumes and so on. I'm currently talking to a composer called Alexander Schubert about a piece using brain sensors - the technology there is amazing, using brain sensors to control light and sound. But we're also thinking about costumes and how to communicate to the audience this idea of the body being a component in a computer system.

It's interesting that you're thinking in those terms, of deliberately playing up and drawing attention to the cyborg-ish elements. I remember that scene in Gattaca with the twelve-fingered concert pianist, where everything looks very traditional and "old-school" - concert hall setting, formal dress for the audience and performer - whereas you're interested in making it be more sci-fi, rather than less?

I remember that scene too – Neil Luck and I did a piece that referenced it a few years ago. In the film, it’s a modified version of a Schubert piece, so indeed it's very traditional. But in what I'm doing it's very much more about showcasing the technology and the idea that I really am extending the body, extending the instrument. I think showing that to the audience is actually more interesting - to be able to see what's happening, rather than things being hidden behind a laptop.

Doing complicated processing in a laptop can certainly be very interesting but it's not very theatrically engaging to an audience. From their point of view, you could be doing anything! So having this live control element where your body and the gloves are controlling and shaping the sounds - that actually gives some level of engagement and understanding of what's happening in terms of the electronics.

Oliver Leith’s piece, inventing an imaginary set of studies for Vicentino’s 16th-century microtonal harpsichord, is fascinating – but of course within the Western art music canon we associate microtonalism with much later periods. Why didn’t Vicentino’s instrument catch on back then?

At the time it would have been very much an eccentric experiment to explore those tunings. Though tuning systems were changing - people were using all sorts of different ones. Even Bach in the Well-Tempered Clavier wasn't writing in equal temperament; certainly he was using this tuning system that would let him write in all twelve keys, which was relatively new, but there were still crucial differences.

In the sixteenth century people were still experimenting with what a tuning system could be and how it could work. Oliver is referencing that in his music, but also taking another instrument that in its own way is 'old' - the synthesiser - and transforming it, allowing it to play quarter-tones by using this experimental instrument, a TouchKeys keyboard attached to it. On this keyboard, there are touch sensors on the surface of the keys, so depending on where I put my fingers, it splits the key so that I can play quarter-tones. You can also set it up to divide the key into three instead, or even make it a sliding pitch, which is what I do in Laurence Osborn's Counterfeits (Siminică). So attaching that to the synth you get all these harmonies that it doesn't normally make.

It immediately sounds much more strange, and also beautiful in its own way. Oliver knows how to do a lot with minimal materials; it's very sparse but that really allows you to hear these harmonies and how they shift, and the subtle differences when I move from an F-half-sharp to a regular F-sharp.

More generally, do you think microtonal harmonies will ever hit the Western classical mainstream (the way Schoenberg predicted people would be whistling his tone-rows in the street)?

In instrumental and orchestral writing, at least within contemporary music, it's done a lot; a lot of music uses interesting tuning systems, and the whole spectral school of composition - all about how, by tuning things perfectly, you can get results like a whole ensemble of string instruments sounding like a trombone! You're creating a kind of acoustic synthesiser.

Experimenting with tuning systems has been around for a lot of the twentieth century. It's definitely something that composers are interested in; and so I guess as those works become part of the canon, then more and more these things will become normal. People probably won't be whistling the tunes, but then that's true of the vast majority of tonal music too, even composers like Mahler or Brahms!

It'll definitely play more of a role, and I think it'll also play more of a role outside of classical music. Composers outside of the classical tradition already play with these tunings systems - in film scores for example. A lot of composers use electronic and synthesised effects; for instance Hans Zimmer uses a rising microtonal Shepard Tone in the soundtrack to Dunkirk - a scale that gives the illusion of sounding like it's endlessly rising, which he uses to create increasing tension through the score and then it eventually resolves into the Nimrod variation from Elgar's Enigma Variations. So I think it's becoming more and more mainstream.

Out of the whole repertoire of music, why was it Bach’s Wir setzen uns specifically that ended up forming the focal point of your Hypnagogia (after Bach), exploring the boundaries between waking, sleep, and a jetlagged middle ground?

There's two reasons. One is that that movement does has a lot of falling thirds and sixths in it. Before the pandemic I used to go back and forth between the UK and Australia quite a lot, which I've stopped now for a number of reasons including the fact that it just wasn't sustainable. And I've found, particularly on larger planes, that as the engines were revving up, I would hear the upper partials and they would be these rising and falling thirds and sixths, and so somehow it reminded me of that.

The other inspiration was a piece by David Lumsdaine, who is a composer that almost no-one knows but who was the subject of my undergraduate dissertation; an Australian composer who moved to the UK in the 1950s and still lives in York. He wrote a piece inspired by hearing the bell at Durham Cathedral, and hearing in that the resonance of this piece by Bach.

For those reasons, I chose that particularly Bach piece. But I have written a lot of pieces that are based on other pieces from the canon that I know as a performer. Especially transforming them using synthesisers, electronics or even AI. Immediately it becomes hard to recognise, though I think in this case it's recognisable, particularly by the end of the piece where you can hear the influence of Wendy Carlos and her Switched-on Bach albums.

More simply, too, I was listening to the St Matthew Passion on those long-haul flights; it's the kind of setting where you have time to listen to a big piece like that.