Skip to main content

Smile Powered Pop Music with PhotoSYNTH @ Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2025

Elevator Pitch

Smile Powered Pop Music with PhotoSYNTH @ Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2025

A Smile Powered Musical Instrument installation that grants instant musical-superpowers to people who engage with it, allowing everybody to make music together, regardless of ability.

Product Description

Smile Powered Pop Music with PhotoSYNTH @ Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2025

This installation, shown at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Exhibition, turns a room full of people into harmonic musical instruments, which, regardless of their abilities, grants each one of them the power to play music simply by opening their mouths and expressing an emotion.

By bestowing new musical abilities to natural movements, facial expressions and poses, this smile powered synthesizer converts your moods into music imbued with those same emotions, offering you new ways to express yourselves sonically… smile to make happy sounding music, frown for a sad chord – there are over a hundred expressions to unlock and discover, and a range of different control mechanisms that adapt to your needs.

This isn’t a musical instrument that you play, this is a musical instrument that plays you!

Co-designed with the Disabled community to ensure that this inclusive instrument works for everybody, and their friends!


How It’s Innovative

This inclusive installation allows everybody to make collaborative music together, without making assumptions about abilities. Each person who joins becomes a new instrument in the song, which complements every previous player, allowing you to instantly form a band. Each person’s facial expression cause the sound to change appropriately, smiles and happiness result in major chords for example, minor chords from frowns. The multi-player aspect encourages social cohesion, group play and togetherness – something very useful for managing autism, for example. As it is based on the act of singing and controlled by your moods via facial expressions, there is a zero learning curve and an immediate sense of musical immersion.

By ascribing audio filters to other expressions, each emoji that you emulate results in a different sound, so it is possible to make compelling music with nothing but your mouth and mood!

See MIDI Innovation In Action

Most Inspiring Use Cases

“The smile is the last thing to go”, was a comment from the Motor Neurone Disease Association, so it important that a smile powered musical instrument should exist. This instrument has been co-designed and developed with the Disabled community to be one of, if not the most, inclusive musical instruments.

It is fun and easy to create music by yourself or with your friends, even if you have a disability or do not have any musical ability.

We witnessed first hand a young girl with very limited motion below the neck play music with her family for the first time and the profound effect it had on them.

Each visitor was gifted the synthesizer as an online application to take home and play for free, and as the source code is also offered as open-source, along with the research behind it, others can build upon these foundations to build new musical instruments of their own.

Drake Music – specialists in accessible audio technology – both provided a grant to help fund development, and featured at the event. Through their DMLab program the instrument has been tested with the Disabled community and used with a broad cross-section of people with varying abilities.

By showing off this inclusive musical instrument in a public setting we can see how people use it and what effects it has on groups and individuals, especially those who have not used musical instruments before, and those who really want to but can’t.

Smiling is contagious which makes this multiplayer mixed reality synthesizer extra fun!

Expansion Plans

Apart from the installation at the Royal Society Summer Exhibition 2025, the project has had interest from museums, specialist schools, dementia groups, charities, therapists, universities and other festivals and events. We hope to add in more musicality and new access requirements discovered from the tests and research we conducted at this event, with the aim to potentially hands-on tour in the future to raise the profile and awareness of accessible musical instruments, in order to ensure that everybody has access to musical tools.

Commercialization

As this is a research project for accessible instrumentation, it is important that it is given away for free so that everybody can access it. It is also open-sourced so that others can build on the research. If you would like to see a PhotoSYNTHIZER installed in your premises, or at your event, do please get in touch to discuss licensing!