Smile Powered Music!
About
Summer Science Exhibition
The Summer Science Exhibition is a free six-day festival showcasing the science shaping our future and will be held at the Royal Society in London from to .
Ever dreamed of being more musical? Well alright... Hold tight!
Come along this summer to have a play with some of the newest instruments from the Accessible Music Instrument Collection, AMIC and learn all about the science behind them.
Imagine if there was a musical magic spell, what musical skills would you wish for? !
Event Details
View Larger MapGetting there
Underground stations: Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus Bus routes: 12, 13, 15 and 453. Coach station: Connections from Victoria coach station See official recommendations
Summer Exhibition 2025
Come and join us for a fun musical celebration of diversity, inclusive technology and science!
The exhibition will feature a series of interactive installations and hands-on demonstrations.
The venue is fully accessible and has hearing loop T enabled 𦻠and quiet spaces.
| Wheelchair accessible | |
|---|---|
| Hearing loop | |
| Lifts, elevators and stairs | Lifts are available for access to the basement level or first floor. |
| Signage | Well lit signage |
| Guide dogs | water, special rest room |
| Accessible toilet | There is an accessible toilet on the ground floor behind the reception area and an ambulant toilet in the basement. There are baby changing facilities in all the toilets in the basement and in the accessible toilet behind reception. Please note that the baby change facilities in the accessible toilets should only be used by parents/carers that specifically require the use of an accessible toilet, as baby changes facilities are available elsewhere. |
| Quiet space | There is a quiet room on the ground floor next to the marble hall. Please ask the reception desk if you need access to this space. |
Developments in science, research, and development have resulted in exciting innovations that allow us to augment people's abilities in radical new ways using neural networking and machine learning.
By constantly refining, improving and evolving, thanks to feedback from loops of reinforced learning, and artificial intelligence that is trained to recognise patterns, we now have the neccessary tools to make it possible to elegantly interface with machines in natural and intuitive new ways.
Developed from the ground up to be accessible and inclusive, with the support and feedback from Drake Music and hundreds of disabled and differently-abled people met through #DMLabs throughout the years.
By tracking your motions and emotions in real-time, this magic mirror converts your everyday movements into beautiful music - making it one of the easiest and most fun synthesizers to play, yet remains highly expressive and capable of high fidelity.
Rather than playing a musical instrument, the Photo
Without any training you can instantly make great music using movements familiar to you.
Every articulation can become an audio revelation⦠Instant musical superpowers!
Learn moreTechnology
How converting emotions into music works
Computers are very good at recognising patterns. If you keep showing a computer ducks, eventually it will realise what ducks have in common - a bill, wings, webbed feat, a distinct waddle and some quacks. With practice it becomes an expert it duck detection.
The same can be true for recognising human characteristics such as moods and emotions. Being happy presents many clues and indications when studied, most obvious is smiling, but joy also brings wide eyes, and delight raises eyebrows. Frowns and furrowed brows indicate signs of melancholy and malaise.
Both are easy to spot. Like ducks.
A well-trained machine can read you like a book...
But can it play you like a musical instrument?
Imagine a world where rather than having to learn a musical instrument, the musical instrument could learn how to play you...
The Photo
By using motion capture and augmented reality, the whole face is converted into a musical instrument where smiles are converted into musical notes, movements into melodies and facial expressions into audio filters and controls.
Using facial landmarks as references, the user's facial expressions and mood are determinded.
These metrics are then used to create music that tries to represent and invoke the same moods and emotions.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C Clarke
capture snapshots of movements and expressions converting them into a digital version that exists in 3d space recognise emotions, expressions and moods and try to determine the intention generate music in response, that represents those same emotions and intentions to convey the same moods evoke the same emotions in the listener who is experiencing the music
The Shape of Sound
Unique Sonic characteristics
Each sound has a distinct shape, similar to a fingerprint or snowflake. This affects how the sound travels, bounces off things, and what effect it will have on matter and how that is perceived by your ears (if at all) .
As sound moves it leaves remnants of itself on things it touches, imagine, if you like, sonic snail trails, vibrating and shedding frequencies and reverberations. These alter the acoustics and harmonics of the original sound and add character such as echo and reverb.
Sound travels at the same speeds as gases do, regardless of whether they are high or low pitched, however high frequencies can be directionalised, unlike bass that is omnipresent.
Round sounds such as the Sine wave sound soft and comfortable, whilst sharp, angular sounds, such as the Sawtooth wave, sound fierce and aggressive.
Often discordant and unpleasant sound is described as noise.
Slow moving sounds are perceived as deep or bassy, whist the faster they vibrate, the higher pitched they sound.
Research
"Some People"
Everybody is different and unique. Some people have incredible memories and can vividly remember past events, whilst some people forget where they put their house keys every day. Some people remain laser focussed while others' brains begin to womble off.
Everybody has their own talents and their limitations.
Everybody is differently abled.
The diversity in human abilities has supported humanity by approaching problems from different perspectives and finding creative new ways of solving them.
Diversity is a human strength, and differences are powerful.
If everybody did the same things in the same fashion, everything would be a sea of uneventful nothingness, devoid of character, charm and appeal, where nothing new or exciting ever happens.
Some people have a natural talent for music whilst others struggle to play a note.
Can technology help us to create a world where everyone can enjoy jamming together?
We should celebrate our differences through the universal language of music and dance!
What a wonderful world it would be!
Shapes & Patterns
Chords & Patterns
Laboratory
Accessible Music Instrument Collection, AMIC
Accessible Music Instrument Collection, AMIC
Over 14 years, working directly with disabled artists and people with no musical abilities, DMLab has been researching ways to grant musical superpowers through research and technology.
Photograph by Alexander Baxevanis
CC2.0 Over the past 14 years we have run the DMLab workshop in London (and now Manchester too) that invites people with technical knowledge and people with disabilities and different abilities to work together in order to research and develop new ways of interacting with technology. One area that we have been working on is using neural networks and machine learning to attempt to determine intention from emotions and motions in realime, in order to augment existing skills with new musical powers. By piggybacking onto intrinsic movements, that come naturally, a performance can be both expressive and communicative, where the dance leads the music, this could be as simple as binding musical actions to hand movements, or as sophisticated as a collaborative multiplayer face controlled pop-music factory that learns how to play you!
A duet collaboration between the godfather of biometric music, Zenon Olenski and DMLab, Drake Music's legendary research and development team, and hundreds of disabled artists.
https://mimugloves.com/
A Celebration of diversity & Inclusion
A musical instrument is at the zenith of fidelity, some are incredibly complicated machines that require time to master. If you can control a complex musical instrument The same techniques used to simplify music making can be used for controlling other things.
- London Venue
- DMLab RichMix
- Address
- 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd , Shoreditch , London , E1 6LA United Kingdom
- Manchester Venue
- School of Digital Arts SODA
- Address
- 35-47 Bethnal Green Rd , Shoreditch , London , E1 6LA United Kingdom
- Telephone
- 020 7739 5444
- [email protected]
History
Music is an unconscious exercise in mathematics in which the mind is unaware that it is calculating.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Music is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics in which the mind is unaware that it is philosophizing.
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Music is an unconscious exercise in communication in which the mind is unaware that it is being guided.
Zenon Olenski
Created by
Accessible Musical Instrument Collection
Access to the right musical instruments and technology can be powerful and transformative. As part of our DMLab programme, we have supported the design and creation of a significant number of innovative accessible musical instruments. We have also established communities and networks of Disabled musicians and technologists working together to develop bespoke solutions to accessible music-making. We have learned a lot from DMLab and now is the right time for us to share our technology, expertise and experienceβ¦ Introducing, the Accessible Musical Instrument Collection (AMIC) : A ground-breaking national collection, representing state-of-the-art of accessible instrument design A world-class resource for Disabled people to explore technological possibilities for making music A focal point for development of cutting-edge accessible instrument technology As well as establishing a collection of existing accessible tech, the AMIC will commission and support the creation of the next generation of accessible instruments. The Collection will be as varied as possible, from high-end commercial instruments through to DIY experimental prototypes and bespoke instruments. We will continue to build the collection as new instruments come to light, working with makers, hackers and music tech companies to make sure it reflects the most up to date technology. AMIC will be housed in an accessible space at Drake Musicβs HQ and will be available to visit. Disabled musicians will be able to visit the collection, test out different instruments using an accessible workstation and (hopefully) find one which suits them. Makers can come and be inspired or see what has already been built. Academics can call upon it for research and teachers can explore options for their students. FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to common questions
Question
Underground stations: Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus Bus routes: 12, 13, 15 and 453. Coach station: Connections from Victoria coach station See official recommendations
Where can I learn more about the research?
There are a number of research papers written about this topic including :
Cool website! How did you make it?
This website was designed and created by designerzen of Awesomething social enterprise. Hand coded using HMTL, CSS and Javascript, using Web-Audio and the Web-MIDI APIs. The source code is available on github