DigiScore

We’re excited to share a short clip of Jess+, an incredible breakthrough for the DigiScore project - where AI, robotics, and human creativity come together to transform how we make music 🎶🤖. Disabled and non-disabled musicians worked with our team to explore a digital music score journey, feeding real-time sound and even physiological data into an AI-driven robotic arm. The result was a responsive, non-judgemental creative partner that draws, moves, and improvises with the musicians - not just for them.  For Jess, this meant her emotions and musical ideas could be expressed in a new way - the system became like a “friend” and a “storyteller.” For Jess, she said ''it's made me feel like there's a new sense of life when it comes to music''. This isn’t just about design for accessibility - it’s about reshaping how we improvise, collaborate, and experience music. All three musicians said their practice was enhanced, relationships deepened, and their confidence in improvisation soared.  We were honoured to see Jess+ recognised by the 2025 Global Tech Awards and the Sound Of The Year Awards for Best Sound Innovation. The Digital Score 👉 Watch the video to see Jess+ in action, and hear how creativity, trust, and technology can come together in harmony. #Inclusion #MusicTech #AI #Robotics #Accessibility #DigiScore #Innovation #CreativeTech

🎉 It's an honour that we've been able to contribute to the book, Artificial Media: Emerging Trends in Narratives, Education and Creative Practice. 🔎 The book is a ground-breaking exploration of the evolving relationship between the fields of artificial intelligence and creativity studies. Scholars and practitioners from leading research centres in South America, Asia and Europe delve into theoretical and philosophical frameworks, practical deployments and data-based critical analyses of artificial-media initiatives that reconfigure authorship and collaboration. The book features co-creation, collective memory, and situated-knowledge practices provided in multiple hands-on examples of technological design, music, visual-arts, journalistic and educational projects that address the ethical and social implications of generative techniques. Craig and Fabrizio's chapter 'Crafting Artificial Musicians: Building Solaris as a Co-operative, Perceiving and Creative AI' discusses their AI jazz quartet, Solaris. Discover more👉 /5f3vunxr @springernature

🎵 Using a game engine to design interactive sound. 🐚 We created a digital music score (Nautilus), inspired by an imaginary deep-sea journey of a nautilus mollusc, as it navigates deep water trenches across the oceans. 👨‍💻 The music describes this journey with the bass flute and generative sound-design highlighting the topography of the oceans and vast openness of the depths. On a technical level, Nautilus used a Unity game engine as the main platform for the visual elements of the digital score, which included sea-bed imagery and sinking notes written on staves tied to anchors. 📑 Find out more in this article, where we discuss the analytical findings from a qualitative investigation of musicking (Small, 1998) with a digital score. The main focus of this article is our methodology and the outline of our methods. Full article 👉 https://lnkd.in/eDtVVAnM In addition to the initial research, we had the pleasure of working with Franziska Baumann in the lab to experiment with the project. Watch here 👀 https://lnkd.in/eHeA_WS9 #soundinnovation #musicinnovation #ERC_Funded

🎵 Just 24 days to go until TENOR 2025 - the International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation! 🏢 This year, we're thrilled to gather in Beijing, hosted by our amazing partners at the China Conservatory of Music 🙌 TENOR brings together a global community of researchers, technologists, and creators exploring the evolving landscape of music notation and representation - from theoretical research to innovative and creative musical applications. 🧠 It’s always an inspiring experience to connect with some of the most innovative minds in music and technology. We can’t wait to share performances and highlights from the conference. Keep an eye out for updates! Find out more 👉 https://lnkd.in/e4eij-3V #TENOR2025 #MusicNotation #MusicTech #MusicResearch #MusicInnovation #ContemporaryMusic

We've been extremely lucky to have experimental musician and composer, Carla Scaletti on the podcast. Carla is the designer of the Kyma sound design language and co-founder of Symbolic Sound Corporation. Her compositions always begin with a “what-if” hypothesis and involve live electronics interacting with acoustic sources and environments. Her work is truly beautiful and thought-provoking 🤩 We talked to Carla about her music making process and experiences as a composer and performer. Listen here 👉 /en2c65d3 More about Carla Scaletti 👉 /5n6vp5y7 #musicpodcast #soundinnovation #experimentalmusic

Stunningly beautiful case study from DigiScore International Partner, Sandeep Bhagwati. Exercices d’étrangeté III Mycorrhizia is an explorative work at the convergence of music, technology, and visual art. It's central feature is a digitally generated score projected onto the floor between musicians, utilising a cloth patterned with a custom mycelium-dye procedure as the projection surface. This visual backdrop symbolises interconnectedness, with musicians wearing vests made from the same cloth. The score’s projection metaphorically simulates the exchange of bio-chemical information in mycelial networks using icons derived from mycelium images. These icons move around the space, triggering specific musical gestures and shaping the overall musical form, offering a new approach to ensemble composition where communication and coordination among musicians evolve dynamically. In addition to the main movements, the work incorporates interlude movements featuring large-scale cellular automata simulations of mycelial growth, influencing musicians’ improvisation through comprovisation scores. This unpredictability adds spontaneity to the performance, enhancing the immersive experience for both performers and audiences. The potential for the score to become interactive introduces further possibilities, with the mycelial network responding to musical behaviours as if they were external influences, offering avenues for novel forms of interconnected musical growth. Find out more: /yynp29em

🎶 This is such a beautiful and interactive way to make accessible and inclusive music. Soundstrokes is a multi-sensory, immersive way to create using sound. With your body acting as the brush, and your voice or instrument acting as the paint, this incredible software champions accessibility and inclusion. 👌🏽We're so impressed with the beauty of this, but also how it can be used in such a wide variety of settings and how it really can help make music creation accessible in such a unique way. Available for installations, workshops, education therapy, and performance settings, this tech allows users to change their environment with their voice. Each voice is unique, and as such, each creation is like a digital fingerprint. 📩 Contact The Melody Crafters at [email protected] for more details. #musiceducation #immersiveuk

Netronomia II: A reimagined musical collaboration that links dispersed performers. Netronomia II is a networked metronome to synchronise multi-city performances despite latency variations. The project reimagined musical collaboration by linking dispersed performers (Wuhan, Beijing, Inner Mongolia) through latency-adjusted circle scores modelled after Beijing’s ring roads. This created a decentralised ecosystem where each node preserved its unique rhythmic identity (30–40ms offsets generating distinct “toporhythms”). Musicians could choose unconventional sound sources (vocal percussion, MIDI controllers) rather than conforming to standardised parts. 🤩 This project illustrates a transformative approach to creating, sharing, and experiencing music in the the digital age. Netronomia II is led by Kenneth Fields at Beijing’s Conservatory of Music. Find out more 👉/yn9n77ez #musicresearch

How to increase creativity when composing music 🎵 Use our Digital Score creativity cards for free 🤩 The digital score creativity cards are free to download and are a great way of offering new ways of thinking, creating, performing and sharing your musical ideas. These cards have been created to help you design, develop and create digital scores. They present insights from different perspectives on the possibilities, opportunities, challenges and questions around the creation of a digital score. They have been designed to operate like a conversation between you, your creative ideas, and the wealth of experience from those who have researched and specialise in making digital scores. Creativity Cards 👉 /4c7trrm2 We'd love to know how you get on with them - comment on this post or drop us an email to chat about your experience 💬 [email protected] #musiceducation #musicmaking #musicteacher #musicinnovation

We're incredibly excited to have won the BEST SOUND INNOVATION award at the Sound of the Year Awards for the Jess+ project Jess+ is a very emotive ensemble to watch and listen to. Musicians, AI and robotics all work together to create a real time feedback loop of music that extends the creativity of disabled and non-disabled musicians, creating an inclusive music ensemble. 🙏 We thank the wonderful Jess+ musicians for their amazing contribution to the project. @jess_fisher_music Clare Bhabra and Deidre Benscik. We also thank @sinfonia_viva @orchestras_live for their collaboration on the project. It's been such a joy to work with you all. Thank you to @sound_awards who are highlighting some beautiful and innovative sounds from around the world. Finally, thank you you to the @mediamuseum who support the awards in the Best Sound Innovation category. 👏 Congratulations to all the other winners! There are some truly beautiful sounds this year - listen here 👉 /yhtjk358 Photo Credit: BBC Research & Development - photo taken in the Media Cafe as part of the BRAID launch event, 2024 DigiScore is funded by European Research Council and based University of Nottingham Department of Music @erc_research

The winning submission for our Best Sound Innovation category in collaboration with the @mediamuseum was a sound recorded by @digiscoreerc , titled ‘JESS+’. A short clip can be heard here. Craig: “Jess+ has changed lives: it brought disabled and non-disabled musicians together into a ‘third space’ for creativity that flattened any hierarchy of mobility and enhanced the sense of togetherness and inclusion in music-making. They expressed how playing with the system reduced the feelings of “expectations and judgements” (Claire) that playing with other humans could engender. For Jess, she felt that the system allowed her to express the emotions that she is sometimes not able to express through her current digital setup. For her, being extended through the system meant that she could feel like she was able to express her feelings directly onto a score. “I wanted to explore that part of me and I wanted – you know, I want my emotions that are in here to get expressed outwardly through that”.” Head to /2024 to listen to the full list of winners. Photo Credit: BBC R&D, taken in the Media Cafe as part of the BRAID launch event, 2024 Audio Recording Credit: Antonious Hanna ( @antoniohannamusic ) recorded at the TAS Celebration event, Kelvin Lecture Theatre, IET London, Savoy Place Musicians (the stars!!) : Jess Fischer (electronics), Clare Bhabra (violin), Deirdre Bencsik (cello) Primary Funders: The Digital Score project (DigiScore) is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. ERC-2020-COG – 101002086) Concept, AI and robot design, creative lead, Principle Investigator: Professor Craig Vear Research Team Dr Adrian Hazzard, Dr Johann Benerradi, Dr Solomiya Moroz, Adam Stephenson. Partners: Sinfonia Viva /, Orchestras Live .uk/ This project received additional funding from the Trustworthy Autonomous System Hub / and the Faculty of Arts at University of Nottingham /arts/

Using game controllers to help disabled children make music has been incredibly lovely to see and has yielded amazing results! Taking place in Joytown secondary school in Kenya, the Joytown project has had tremendous impact on the disabled school children we have the had pleasure of working with. Before the project, the children were unable to play a mainstream musical instrument, excluding them from music education. Together with research from Macharia Kelvin, a disabled musician himself, we developed an interactive digital score using readily available game controllers. The results were incredible! With only an hour of the students playing with the game controllers, the students could play the technical exercises required for their national exams such as scales and arpeggios. Learn more 👉 /wktdvhx5 #accessiblemusic #musiceducation