DMLab London: Inclusive Instruments & Hearing – 9 March

Meet the speakers

Billy Payne (he/him)

Image description: A headshot of a white man with short dark hair and a mustache. He is wearing blue glasses, a stripey tshirt and a knitted sweater vest. He is smiling warmly at the camera.

Billy Payne is one half of Billy & Andy’s Music School CIC, a social enterprise working with young disabled and neurodivergent musicians, and is also a creative technologist who loves building instruments. He started learning to make and code after attending the first DMLab North-West session over a decade ago and has since developed many accessible instruments, both for other musicians and for his own workshops.

A few years ago, while browsing folk instruments upstairs at Johnny Roadhouse Music in Manchester, Billy knocked over a koto with his rucksack. Keen to placate the angry shopkeeper but unable to afford to pay for the koto, he bought a much cheaper instrument called the Pentachord, which turned out to be a rare accessible guitar-zither hybrid, developed and sold briefly in the 1970s. Believing this series of events to be highly serendipitous and possibly evidence that he was destined to meet this instrument, Billy has been working for the past few months on recreating the Pentachord as a laser cuttable, DIY friendly design.

Cheryl Hui (she/her)

Image description: A woman with glasses and a black cap sitting with her face resting against her chin. She looks off to the side, and appears to be deep in thought.

Cheryl Hui is a musical instrument designer and researcher working at the intersection of accessibility, technology, and community music-making.

In this presentation, she will share the development of the JOS music mat, co-designed with Joy of Sound, a charity that runs inclusive community music workshops. The project reflects Cheryl’s belief that music-making is for everyone, and that every voice, however it is expressed, deserves to be heard.

Adrian Webb (he/him) & Tom Staniford (he/him): OutcomePath

Image description: A selfie of two men smiling at the camera. They are dressed in warm, casual dark clothes. One man wears glasses, and is also a cochlear implant user.

Adrian chairs the London tech/AI business, OutcomePath, and lectures on AI internationally. A musician for 40 years, he composed a track designed to help people sleep that has 1.3million streams on Spotify. He is a gigging jazz musician and fascinated by the philosophy and psychology of music.

Tom is Chief Marketing Officer of Outcome Path’s Special Projects division. He has spoken on Rare Disease, Branding, and Inclusive Design and until recent medical challenges was a 25-yr Classical Guitar player. He has a hearing aid and a cochlear implant and considers Mark Knopfler to be his spiritual mentor.

At this event, Tom and Adrian will be talking about the world’s first ever Sound Free Concert that they, through OutcomePath, will be staging in London in May 2026. An audience with cochlear implants will experience and explore streamed GenAI music. No speakers. No recordings. No ‘sound’. Once and gone. The concert challenges paradigms of inclusion for deaf people and prompts debate about access and AI/Deep Body technologies.

Access

• Rich Mix, is wheelchair accessible, via a permanent entrance ramp and internal lifts.
• The event will be held in The Studio, which is level throughout, located on the 4th floor.
• There are accessible toilets (with RADAR locks) on the ground, 1st, 2nd and 4th floors.
• We will have live captions and BSL interpreters at the session (also on the livestream).
• There is a hearing loop in the Studio that can be used by switching most hearing aids to the ‘T’ position.
• There is also an infrared system in The Studio which requires the use of headsets, provided by Rich Mix.
• There will be a quiet space available.

Please let us know of any specific access requirements when registering for the event.

Find out more about accessibility at Rich Mix