Following in the family footsteps of releasing innovative audio products, zen set up designerzen as a company to combine technology, music, art and nature into uniquely creative concepts to empower individuals. His work spanning the last twenty five years covers many mediums, from online to physical, and has been presented in museums, exhibitions, arcades, festivals and even on your phone.
designerzen’s 2001 flagship product was the dreamCapturer – a wearable device that converts dreams into music. By recording biometrics and interpreting them with machine learning models trained on your own emotional states, each dream would create new musical composition, so that every night a unique soundtrack “quilt” of your dreams (and nightmares) is created which you can enjoy and share or confine to the vaults, never to be repeated again.
Since then he has created bespoke products and installations for the public that mix technologies and arts in fun and creative ways, as well as giving talks on technology, the future and music.
His focus for the past few years has been to create musical instruments & music creation tools with the lowest barriers to entry – intuitive tools that everybody can play instinctively without any training. This passion led him to help start the DMLab monthly workshop over a decade ago which brings together technology makers and disabled artists, which has now grown to two monthly events including one at the School of Digital Arts (SODA) in Manchester.
Together with Drake Music – a charity that specialises in accessible technology – and hundreds of disabled artists, they developed the award winning ‘PhotoSynth : Pop Music Factory’ series which allows anybody to make interactive songs just by moving around in front of their webcam.
Using a grant from the British Council he created a magical Bowler hat that grants whomever wears it with instant musical talent and gives them a simple and fun way to make really expressive music using nothing more than movement. Due to COVID bringing everybody inside, online and apart from one another, it seemed like a good time to continue the idea and recreate the same experience but for an online audience, this time removing even the need for a hat!
And so the PhotoSYNTH#InterFACE was born – an online, augmented reality, multiplayer synthesizer – or put simply, a smile powered, face controlled musical instrument and song creator with some added psychedelic visuals.
If you would like to see more like this, be sure to check out DrakeMusic Lab #DMLab, and together help them create the next generation of musical instruments.