Bio: Dr. Mat Dalgleish is a researcher, educator, and artist-designer working at the intersection of people, musical and audiovisual technology, and accessibility. He has particular interests in instrument design, sound synthesis, and procedural generation, and is also a congenitally one-handed musician. With an initial background in sculpture, Mat subsequently studied for an MA in Media Arts with interactive media pioneer Rolf Gehlhaar, before a CETL-funded PhD that explored David Tudor-inspired approaches to digital musical instrument design. From 2009-11 Mat was a visiting researcher at The OU Music Computing Lab and from 2011-2023 led a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate music/audio and creative technology and performing arts provision at the University of Wolverhampton. He was awarded Senior Fellowship of the HEA (SFHEA) in 2016. Mat is currently Senior Lecturer in Game Audio and Technical Design at the University of Staffordshire, a Leonardo CripLab AI fellow, an Accessibility Chair of NIME 2026, and a trustee of The OHMI Trust.
My earliest works, such as Loop (2004–), explored the latent possibilities of obsolete technologies, treating obsolescence as renewal and a site for hacking, recombination, and re-use. Later projects extended this techno-archaeological interest through contemporary (largely digital) means, probing the temporal, spatial, and social logics of technology with emphasis on accessibility and human–technology relations. Eden3 (2008–10) sonified real-time sensor data from trees; Haptic Drum Kit (2010–11), Haptic Bracelets (2011–12), and Song Walker Harmony Space (2010–12) employed whole-body interaction for learning musical skills; Beyond Audio Description (2017) reframed AD in theatre through ambient sound design; Interior (2020) reimagined Maeterlinck’s Intérieur as a procedurally generated radio play for COVID times; and the Music Jacket (2011), Postrum (2014), TYG (2024), and Chimera (2025) reimagined musical instrument design’s privileging of acoustics over player needs. Across these projects runs a sustained fascination with the audiovisual—particularly the synthetic—and its crossover with other senses.