A festival powered by research and innovation

From amps to underwater microphones, UKRI-backed technologies helped local musicians shape a unique track, Circles, for this year’s Swindon Shuffle.

For the second year running, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is sponsoring local music festival Swindon Shuffle.

From 10 to 14 September, venues across Swindon’s old town will host the best local and regional grassroots music acts. Attendance is free, with donations taken during the event going to end-of-life care provider Prospect Hospice.

Festival organiser Ed Dyer said: “UKRI has been a valuable supporter of the festival over the last two years, helping to support creativity and music in Swindon.”

Swindon Shuffle focuses on up-and-coming acts, providing a platform for their music.

We think it’s critical for the younger generations to get involved and to understand that music is something that happens in real life with real instruments in front of an audience, not just on a small phone screen on YouTube.

It's a key part of what we stand for.

Ed Dyer

Swindon Shuffle co-organiser

A screen on a tablet device displaying LEGO bricks. A physical LEGO base plate with LEGO bricks can be seen on a table behind it.

Playable Technology Limited's Beat Blocks enable you to build music with LEGO bricks. Credit: Adam Gasson

UKRI-backed technology hitting the right notes in Swindon

To further support the festival’s ethos, UKRI organised the recording of a specially commissioned music track at Swindon’s Western Audio Studios.

The track features several music technology innovations funded by UKRI and played in the studio by local musicians.

The idea for the Swindon Shuffle was inspired by established city centre music festivals like the Camden Crawl, The Great Escape and the Oxford Punt. Its name comes from the audience ‘shuffling’ between music venues to watch a variety of acts performing.

Rob Pellow, guitarist with Wiltshire-based band The Real Cheesemakers played one of Blackstar Amplification’s Silverline amps on the record.

Blackstar’s products fuse digital signal processing (DSP) with the legendary feel of valve amps, keeping that unmistakable tone at full volume.

The DSP technology was developed with the support of three Innovate UK-funded projects carried out by the company from 2012 to 2016.

It's the sort of amp that when you try it, it immediately sounds nice and makes you want to play with it more. It influenced what I played on the record.

Even just seeing how it responded to my playing, being able to play a bit softer and completely change the tone meant I could play around with dynamics in a way that I hadn't really prepared for.

Rob Pellow

Guitarist, The Real Cheesemakers

A woman standing proudly in front of a large, stringed musical instrument.

Sarah Nicolls with her 'standing grand' piano. Credit: Adam Gasson

Standing on the verge of a breakthrough

The track is a truly multi-instrumental affair. Rob and other local musicians DJ Harman of Wild Isles, Sean Ivens of All Ears Avow and Tom Haynes provided an impressive backing of guitar, bass, drums and keyboards. A host of other musicians made their contributions using cutting-edge music tech.

Future Piano founder Sarah Nicolls played the Standing Grand, a vertical grand piano that tackles the space limitations of modern homes. The Standing Grand is easy to move around and lightweight, thanks to the contemporary engineering and materials used to build it.

Sarah’s research and development of the Standing Grand was supported by two grants from Innovate UK.

Through her own style of playing the strings as well as the keys, she invented the new piano shape, which makes every part of every string available to the performer, adding to the piano’s palette.

On the track, local musician and producer Tom Haynes played ROLI’s Seaboard controller. This is a  futuristic keyboard with a soft, touch-sensitive surface that lets musicians bend, slide and shape sounds as if they were playing a string or wind instrument.

The funding we received from Innovate UK was essential in our development of the Seaboard.

Innovate UK was a consistent and supportive partner from the early ideation phase, all the way through to industrialisation and preparation for mass manufacturing.

We are grateful that the UK has such robust support for innovation and the building of new technologies, and we hope to continue to partner with Innovate UK in the future.

Jon Beyer

Head of Community and Content, ROLI

A female wheelchair user demonstrates a controller in a music studio.

Jess Fisher demonstrates the CMPSR accessible music controller. Credit: Matt Beech

Quirky controllers and a multi-species collaboration

Award-winning Jess Fisher from Able Orchestra worked with Digit Music’s Simon Tew, recording with the company’s disability-friendly CMPSR, pronounced composer, controller in the Old Library, Mansfield’s state-of-the-art accessible recording studio.

David de la Haye, a researcher in music at Newcastle University, used hydrophones, microphones that can be used underwater, to record the sounds of Coate Water and Stanton Pond in Swindon.

He later manipulated these with digital effects before they were added to the track, creating what he described as a ‘multi-species collaboration’.

Most unusual of all the musical innovations is Playable Technology’s BeatBlocks app, played in the studio by founder Dr Ben Schogler, that lets you build music with LEGO bricks.

The app uses machine learning and computer vision. When it sees a brick it plays a sound, so users can compose tracks just by placing bricks on a LEGO base.

Watch the Circles music video

Credit: UKRI

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