Turning Soft Cymatics into an Audio Visual Sampler

It’s been 3 months since my last update on the making of this instrument. A lot has happened, and I have two very exciting events coming up in London this month.

I’m excited to return to the V&A Museum next Friday 17th of July showing Soft Cymatics at Digital Meetup: Sound Systems. This is a free event for those interested in incorporating music and technology into their creative practice. You can try out Soft Cymatics and learn how I made it; build touch-responsive instruments with Tom Fox (maker of Spoke Board, the microcontroller embedded in Soft Cymatics); learn visual livecoding for AV performance with Michael Cook & make an algorave jam with Nadezhda Khalid.

I can only seem to get things done if I have a deadline. Having this V&A event in my calendar has been the ideal deadline to figure out the most robust way to wire up the instrument. The first time I showed Soft Cymatics at Not For Sale Gallery back in January it was made with a TouchBoards and conductive thread sewn circuits. It worked fine until it was moved and then the threads started touching eachother resulting in glitches (not the cool kind, the kind that result in the instrument chaotically playing itself). So after that exhibition I replaced the TouchBoards with Spoke Boards, and I updated the sewn circuits with handmade patch cables made from ribbons and conductive thread, patching the circuits together with press studs. I showed this version at Shake The High Road Festival in May. This version worked a little better but the press studs weren’t robust enough to stay connected while children played the instrument. I had to keep reconnecting the press studs all day. Also, my design for patch cable ribbons wasn’t insulated enough resulting in more uncool glitches, this time the kind that short out the instrument and stop it working altogether.

Photos of Soft Cymatics at Shake The High Road Festival, Red Lion Leytonstone, 2 May 2026

I asked e-textiles legend Tara Pattenden (aka Phantom Chips, whose archive of Malleable Instrumets is here and totally worth checking out) for advice. She recommended I solder wires to the microcontrollers and sew the wires to each quilt patch. It took ages to hand-sew each of the 64 cables into the back of the tapestry. This is one of those times where making a large instrument is so much more time-consuming than making a small one. I’m incredibly happy to now be able to say that this instrument is finally, truly robust. I can fold it, transport it to a venue in a suitcase, unfold it, plug it in and it’s ready to go. Finally my goal of making an ecofriendly, foldable large instrument that can be taken on public transport and installed within minutes and with minimum physical labour is finally complete.

You can see a video of all the wires sewn into the back of the instrument at the end of the below promo vid about my upcoming show at Dublin Castle Camden on 31st of July.

I’m so super excited that this instrument is now ready for studio exploration. I’ll be spending the next 3 weeks until the 31st of July creating new audio-visual drumkits of video samples and exploring triggering them with Soft Cymatics. Mostly when I make music the result is experimental pop made by layering up samples and live remixing them, but as this is an exploration of an entirely new instrument and composition process, I’m truly not sure what will happen. All I know is that on the 31st I’ll be playing whatever comes out of these experiments. Please come along it’s going to be so fun!

The idea of this instrument triggering not just audio but video too came about after I performed it at Sonorities Festival, Belfast in April. Under the name Vital Organs, Sarah Angliss, Karina Townsend and I played an improvised performance at the Handmade Music event at Accidental Theatre. Karina was the true showstopper with her handmade bagpipes made of rubber gloves. Sarah played the musical saw and I was using Soft Cymatics to trigger Sarah’s Ealing Feeder (robotic carillon instrument). After the show various people asked me what my ‘magic blanket’ was doing and it made me realise that in a group performance it’s quite difficult for the audience to understand what this instrument does. They see me touching the velvet but don’t know what it’s doing. So I have since been exploring ways to make this more transparent to the audience.

When I performed at Tones & Drones in May, I experimented with having Soft Cymatics trigger videos of the making of the instrument (sewing the quilt patches, cutting the velvet, etc), I call this Audio Visual Musique Concrete, and I think the video representation of the sounds really helped the audience understand how my gestures result in the music being performed. But musically I felt a bit limited as I had only created one video drumkit. So now my goal is to create a variety of video drumkits that I can swap out througout the performance. That’s what I’m working on and exploring in the lead-up to the 31st of July gig.

Here’s a video of me exploring the instrument’s AV capabilities for the first time at the Tones & Drones event at Walthamstow Trades Hall on the 14th of May 2026. Thanks Odd Lust for the video (Odd Lust ha just posted a video of his new live set in it’s entirety, go check it out).

Here’s a photo I found on my phone from that night. The wires were literally held in place by gaff tape. I’ve now sewn them in place.

So now I’m excited to go deep into what this crazy instrument can do. If you’re in London, it would be great to see you either at the V&A on the 17th or at Dublin Castle Camden on the 31st. If you’re elsewhere please come visit me either in London or in Belfast where I’ll be spending most of my time as of 2nd of August (more about that some other time). XO Lia