Event Location

Contact

General enquiries:

justin.paterson@uwl.ac.uk

More Information

The programme will showcase innovative approaches reshaping how we design, play, study, and teach synthesis – through paper presentations, performance‑demonstrations, practical demos, and plenaries. Participants will explore five interlinked strands: Instruments (practice, performance, materiality), Interfaces (design, interaction, human‑machine creativity), Ideas (histories, aesthetics, cultures), Systems (technologies, infrastructures, ecologies), and Futures (AI/ML, hybrid instruments, speculative design). Topics include interface design and control modalities; modular vs. fixed architectures; cultural histories and communities of practice; interoperability and maintenance; and emerging directions from circuit‑behaviour modelling to novel instrument architectures.

·       A key focus is fostering collaboration across academia, industry, and enthusiast communities – building bridges between research and practice to strengthen learning, professional development, and design innovation.

·       The organisers are committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion, welcoming contributions that broaden participation and represent the full spectrum of synthesizer‑related industries and communities.

·       Fees include coffee/tea and snacks throughout the conference, lunch Saturday and Sunday, conference buffet dinner Saturday, and pizza at the studio event on Friday evening.

Unique to this event, Friday evening features a distributed‑creativity session in the Townshend Studio, where delegates can craft patches, motifs, or sequences on rare instruments from Pete Townshend’s collection; contributions will be woven into a single composition premiered at the closing plenary, with stems shared afterward and opportunities for peer‑reviewed, practice‑research publication of participant remixes on the SyReN website. Following the symposium, presenters will be invited to submit full texts for peer‑reviewed review and ranking to go into Routledge-published proceedings, ensuring that insights from the weekend shape the future of synthesis scholarship and creative practice.