Sounding Bodies: An immersive and responsive environment for participatory classical music performance
Project partners: Royal College of Art, ARCO – Music for All, Kingston School of Art
The Royal College of Art is leading a project to explore how immersive and responsive environments can transform the way young people encounter and perform classical music.
The project has been developed in collaboration with ARCO – Music for All, a community music charity in Islington working with Gen Alpha children from Global Majority backgrounds, including SEN/D learners and children from low-income families.. Kingston School of Art will bring interaction design and human-computer interaction expertise.
Through a series of co-design workshops, ARCO’s Gen Z teachers and Gen Alpha students will work alongside the research team to prototype new participatory relationships between musicians and audience.
The project builds upon the previously seed-funded research project, Drawing Lines, that used real-time motion capture and Somax2, an AI improvisation system, to translate a performer’s movement and sound qualities into live visual and sonic responses shared with the audience.
Sounding Bodies will investigate how the same techniques can be scaled and adapted into a tool that young aspiring classical musicians and their audiences can experience together whilst co-designing a new form of classical-live event.
The work takes place primarily in the RCA Visualisation Lab, using its specialist motion capture infrastructure alongside a lightweight markerless extension that can travel into community settings beyond the lab.
Participants will be co-designers and user-testers throughout, with co-design and inclusivity as the project’s organising principles. By making young musicians the authors rather than the recipients of the experience, the project aims to make live classical music events more inviting, participatory and accessible.
Sounding Bodies is one of two university-led collaborations awarded funding from the XR Network+ Future Live Fan Experiences R&D challenge to develop the next wave of live fan experience across music, sport and cultural events.
Photograph by Vivaan Thongram: Drawing Lines: Sue-In Kang, sound artist and violinist, performing to a live audience, 15 May 2026.
Categories: Live events, Research, Technology