Every year, many new musical instruments are created, but most drop out of regular use after just a few years, while classic acoustic and electronic designs remain ubiquitous in many styles of music. This talk is the story of an instrument which has so far defied the odds. The magnetic resonator piano (MRP) is an augmented acoustic grand piano which uses electromagnets to vibrate the strings, producing a sonic vocabulary at once familiar and new.

"When I first created the MRP in 2009 as part of a personal composition project, I had no expectations for how long the instrument might last. Fifteen years later, thanks to the continued collaboration of composers, performers and improvisers around the world, there is a repertoire of several dozen pieces for MRP and a collection of instruments, including a newly commissioned MRP at SARC. This talk will present some of the original motivations for the design and the way that my encounters with other musicians challenged and enriched my assumptions, redefining the identity of the instrument itself. Although the technical design of the MRP has stabilised, the musical identity of the instrument remains in a constant state of flux, reinterpreted anew as it attracts new collaborators and musical contexts."

Andrew McPherson is Professor of Design Engineering and Music in the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. A composer (PhD U.Penn 2009) and electronic engineer (MEng MIT 2005) by training, his research focuses on digital musical instruments, especially those which extend the capabilities of traditional musical instruments. He leads the Augmented Instruments Laboratory, a research team investigating musical interface design, performer-instrument interaction and embedded hardware systems. Notable projects include the magnetic resonator piano, an electromagnetically-augmented acoustic grand piano which has been used by dozens of composers and performers worldwide; TouchKeys, a sensor overlay which transforms the electronic keyboard into a nuanced multi-touch control surface; and Bela, an open-source embedded hardware platform for ultra-low-latency audio and sensor processing which spun out into a company in 2016. Andrew holds a research fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering and an ERC Consolidator Grant (funded by UKRI) entitled "RUDIMENTS: Reflective understanding of digital instruments as musical entanglements", which looks at the cultural implications of engineering decisions in music technology.