Meet our new grantees! Accessible Instrument Development Fund 2025

New year, new accessible instruments!

 

After a successful first year of our Accessible Instrument Development Fund programme, we are delighted to announce another year of funding, and to introduce our two new grantees, Hunaid Nagaria and Tom Fox!

Hunaid Nagaria

 

Hunaid facing the camera, wearing a white shirt and glasses.

Hunaid is a a designer, technologist & illustrator based in London. He loves building things which make everyday life joyful. The challenges that excite Hunaid the most are where his contributions aren’t limited to a singular discipline. Along the way, Hunaid’s work has been supported by institutions such as the Mayor of London’s office, IxDA, The Grantham Institute, All India Council for Technical Education, and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. Nowadays, you can find Hunaid biking around London, navigating food, art, and people. 

Hunaid’s previous work, Jammies, an accessible instrument for people living with dementia

 

Jammies, an instrument similar to the form factor of that of a piano but with just 5 rectangular keys and LED strips for each of those keys.

“Jammies are a set of musical instruments designed to improve the quality of life for people living with mild to moderate Dementia by empowering them to reminisce, improvise and jam along to music that is of personal value to them, without assuming any prior musical ability or knowledge. 

This project, done during my time as a master’s student at the RCA, solidified my interest in how technologies, simple or complex, can facilitate recreation for people with varying abilities. 

My work on Jammies prompted me to dive deeper into the adaptive technologies space and I followed it up with Midas, an adaptive gaming controller for people living with Muscular Dystrophy. Although Midas was built for gaming, I’m very interested in exploring it’s application as a musical instrument given that gaming controllers share many attributes with musical instruments, which is why I’m grateful and excited to receive Drake Music’s support in this process.” 

Discover more of Hunaid’s work

Hunaid’s portfolio
Linkedin
Instagram

Tom Fox

 

Tom, a bearded man sat behind a laptop, with musical devices in front of him.
Credit Francisca Siza

 

Tom Fox is Creative Director for Hackoustic, CTO for MusicTechFest labs, Head of Design Technology for Beechwood Park School, Maker, Musician and Creative Technologist. His work focuses on how technology can be used to interact with and create music in new and interesting ways. From using data streams for composition to exploiting laws of physics to create new musical interfaces. 

Tom’s previous work, SPOKE

 

A round circuit-board with rainbow led lights, the board has a logo on it for SPOKE and has connections on the edges for connecting things to it.

“My most recent project is a new type of capacitive touch board called SPOKE that uses the RP2040 IC chip from raspberry Pi to create a 27-Pin touch sensor device. It allows you to play USB-MIDI instruments by touching the board, or by adding wires and other objects to create your own interfaces. The board also has a bunch of features and is easily editable to customise what sort of computer interface you want it to be. One instrument I’ve made from the board is a musical bonsai tree, where each branch is a piece of insulated wire and is mapped to a different MIDI note. 

For this development fund project I intend to explore how to make the board more accessible and add features and options from both the hardware and software side to remove as many barriers to access as possible. I will be teaming up with Tim Palm to iterate designs and create an instrument and tool that will hopefully have wide ranging uses and benefits.”

Discover more of Tom’s work

Tom’s portfolio
Tom’s Instagram
SPOKE Instagram

We’re excited to see what the year brings for these new accessible instruments!

This project, a part of DMLab London, is supported by the City of London Corporation’s charitable funder, City Bridge Trust, London Catalyst, and with public funding from Arts Council England.