Meet the Makers

At DMLab London on 29th July, we invited our 2023 Accessible Musical Instrument Seed Fund recipients to present their work. Below you can find videos of their presentations to find out more about their amazing projects!

Lee Holder Presents: The Calliope

Nicola Woodham Presents: Buffer Live

 

Zen Olenski Presents: The _PhotoSYNTH 4D_

 

More about last year’s successful entries:

 

Image description: A headshot of Lee against a black background. Lee is wearing a black hoodie and a yellow lanyard and is smiling at the camera.

Image description: A headshot of Lee against a black background. Lee is wearing a black hoodie and a yellow lanyard and is smiling at the camera.

Lee Holder (they/them)

Lee Holder / Lee Chaos is a music hacker who works for The Music Works and Music Leaders UK by day, and DJs & creates interactive audiovisual immersive art by night. For the last 20 years, Lee has focused on improving music inclusion for people with additional needs through building and modifying music technology to widen participation & inclusion.

The Calliope accessible instrument designed for Drake Music as part of The Music Works Sound Gadgets initiative explores RFID tags and the gamification of music making to engage young neurodiverse people through play.

Find out more about The Music Works

 

Image description: Nicola is looking towards the camera against a white wall. Nicola is wearing a white shirt with small images of hands, hearts, and moons.
Image description: Nicola is looking towards the camera against a white wall. Nicola is wearing a white shirt with small images of hands, hearts, and moons.

 

Nicola Woodham (she/her)

Nicola Woodham has performed and composed electronic music since 2014. Vocals are central and she brings in sound-poetry and free-improvisation. She uses live performance as a way to scale herself up and to reflect on her rights to take up space as a disabled person more widely. Since 2019 she has been designing and building wearable instruments with tactile e-textiles to explore multi-sensory interfaces for playing music.

Nicola has developed a modular, wearable live audio sampler, Buffer Live. The instrument can be coded to explore a variety of frequency preferences. It is played via soft fabric sensors that are responsive to pressure and contact. It is built using a Bela Mini and derived from the Live Sampler included in the embelashed audio tool kit.

Find out more about Nicola

Find out more about embelashed

Image description: A black and white illustration of zen wearing a hat.
Image description: A black and white illustration of zen wearing a hat.

 

zen olenski (they/them)

From machines that convert dreams into soundtracks, through cybernetic interfaces giving plants the power to sing, to magical musical hats, sympathetic synthesizers and the most stealthy wearable instruments, zen from designerzen has been on a relentless 25-year mission bringing colourful sound solutions into everybody’s worlds.

The _PhotoSYNTH 4D_ is a holographic musical instrument that by observing and learning from your movements enhances them with radical new musical superpowers.

Find out more about designerzen