It began, as many ambitious projects do, with something simple: I needed a percussionist. Just one. Someone with rhythm, soul, a pair of hands — ideally attached to a human being. But even that proved elusive. And when it came to the next phase of the project — recruiting and training an eight-piece choir — the reality hit hard: at this stage, it would be impossible.

So I decided to build my own.

That’s right. A choir of eight robotic heads, each with its own speaker, its own voice, and most importantly, its own expressive personality. Not puppets. Not sound installations. These are fully embodied performers.

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🤖 The Choir of the Future: How It Works

Each robotic head is a character in its own right — a face in the ensemble, a voice with a point of view. Here’s how the whole system functions:

🧠 One “Head Head”

The central brain of the operation:

• A Teensy microcontroller handles USB MIDI output to my laptop.
• A paired ESP32 module broadcasts real-time control data using ESP-NOW, a fast and stable wireless protocol.
• It acts as conductor, timekeeper, and occasionally, a mischief-maker.

🗣️ Eight Singing Heads

Each of the eight robotic heads includes:

• A Creative Pebble speaker embedded in a silicone face that acts as the mouth.
• A jaw, eyes, and eyelids, animated using servos.
• One camera eye, and one LED screen eye.
• Two tiny front-facing ears, with built-in microphones or sensors.
• An ESP32 to receive wireless instructions and control local motion and behavior.

Each head can:

• Generate or interpret MIDI phrases.
• Animate its mouth and eyes in sync with what it “sings”.
• Embody a personality — from shy whisperer to solo-hungry diva.

🎛️ Audio System

• Each head receives its own audio channel from an ESI GIGAPORT interface.
• A laptop running Ableton Live sends independent tracks to each head.
• Voices, drones, glitches, melodies — spatially isolated and theatrically aligned.

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🧩 Expression and Memory

This choir doesn’t just perform. It remembers. Each head can store its own fragments of melody, a vocal vocabulary (“la”, “fa”, “oo”), and behavioural rules.

Personalities and presets can be updated in real-time:

“You’re now the lead.”
“You’re just vibing in the background.”
“You only sing when two others are quiet.”

It’s a system designed for emergent theatre — not just harmony, but character.

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🎭 Why This Isn’t Just a Gimmick

This project started out of necessity. But it’s become something more:

It’s about what performance becomes when human expression is externalised, mechanised, and made modular.

It’s about satire, identity, glitch, and control.

I don’t want to simulate a choir. I want to build a real one — just with parts you can solder, and personalities you can upload.

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Follow along as I prototype, animate, and rehearse with the world’s most unpredictable chorus line. One thing’s for sure: they’ll never complain about the catering.

Or more fully “Gatwick on the Orient Express: A Musical Journey Through Systems, Identity and the Near Future”

It began as a joke — recreating the luxury of the Orient Express on the Gatwick Express, with velvet, jazz, and cocktails hurtling between Victoria and Brighton. But as I followed the original route from Paris to Istanbul on ordinary trains, passing through increasingly unstable regimes, the satire sharpened. Each border brought more surveillance, more unease. By Istanbul, where protests were being crushed and the mayor imprisoned, I knew the project needed to change.

The journey became something darker and more relevant — a performative, participatory experiment in identity, obedience, and systems of power. At UXCamp Brighton, I began prototyping this new vision: a musical, headphone-based game played by passengers in a real train carriage. The original idea of luxury shifted to something more allegorical, absurd, and unsettling.

Passengers are sorted into “tribes” — originally represented by nuts and metals, combining absurd bureaucracy with Uno-style gameplay. But now, something richer has emerged. Each tribe aligns with one voice part from a choir: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass. Each of these four groups contains two hidden polarities — left and right, inclusion and control, ecological idealism and technocratic urgency. While the choir sings in harmony, the underlying values are in tension. The train’s movement mirrors this tension as passengers discover that no tribe is pure, and harmony may be a performance.

The project now also functions as a time machine. Each station on the journey south represents a year — taking us from 2025 to 2035. As the years pass, authoritarianism creeps in. Instructions from the “Ministry of Direction” grow more controlling. The system seems stable — until it begins to fracture. The only escape at the end? Reconciliation. To pass the ticket barriers at Brighton, you must collaborate with a member of a different tribe. Division cannot continue.

Inspired by my involvement with the Urgent Optimists, this project is about exploring not just what could go wrong — but how we might come back together. Through play, music, and systems thinking, we simulate what polarisation feels like, and invite participants to rewrite the ending.

A train ride. A social experiment. A piece of immersive political theatre in motion.

I imagined mahogany panelling, velvet upholstery, and silver service. Or at least the illusion of it, briefly conjured up on a commuter train heading south to the sea.

The original idea was simple: transform the Gatwick Express into something dreamlike. A musical, immersive event that would take passengers from Victoria to Brighton not just geographically, but imaginatively. A re-creation of the luxury and romance of the original Orient Express. We would overlay sound, costume, stories and more. There would be performers, passengers-as-participants, from Gatwick as Munich to Preston Park as Sofia. I wrote about it here: Gatwick on the Orient Express.

As preparation, I decided to take the real journey. From Brighton to Istanbul, via Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Arad, Bucharest, Sofia. A twelve-day train ride across Europe. A backpacker documenting the journey with his phone and video recorder. There would be research—but in a suck-it-and-see way—no preconceptions, and at the very least, a low-carbon holiday.

I wanted each city to speak for itself. A cursory hour in Strasbourg (on the Gatwick Express – a “we don’t stop here” Clapham Brexit Junction), for Vienna to breathe Mahler, a Bartokxic Budapest and so on. I expected each stop to have its own flavour, a local signature. And as we traversed Europe, to experience a gradual “Orientation”.

What I found was different.

Paris was joyful—an impromptu street concert by the canal, African music, dancing, laughter. But as we continued towards Budapest, everything felt increasingly familiar. Similar to the UK but with better croissants. Stations blurred into one another. I should add that our worst experience with train timetabling was, ironically, in Germany. We arrived in a rainy Munich 4 hours late, and so tired that the hotel receptionist instantly upgraded us to the best room in the building!

And then came the oddities. Young people on the trains speaking English, not from school, but from online gaming. Graffiti on every piece of rolling stock, in every station, across every country. A strange consistency in the language of defacement. The overnight (luxury!) sleeper from Arad to Bucharest shook, rattled and rolled the night away (the bottle of red wine that the “Man in Seat 61” recommended was most welcome). And the night train to Istanbul – ejected at 1 am with our luggage to pass through security and passport control on the Bulgarian/Turkish border.

In the last stretch to Istanbul, the train felt slower, the landscape barer, the infrastructure stranger: until the last stage: a modern metro train at Halkali, 25km from the heart of the city. A city in the midst of celebration (the end of Ramadan) and unrest (student protests). 

I had expected the journey to be aesthetic. Instead, it became political.

Every country we passed through bore the signs of a shift to the right. In France and Germany, murmurs of nationalism. In Hungary and Romania, more than murmurs. And in Turkey, we arrived days after the mayor of Istanbul had been imprisoned. Protests were suppressed. Surveillance was visible. The romantic journey had become an encounter with fragility.

At times, I thought of Mr Norris Changes Trains. Isherwood’s novel, full of veiled identities and polite conversations in dining cars while the world tilts toward authoritarianism, felt uncomfortably apt. Like him, I was on a train moving east, speaking softly while the political volume rose outside the windows. And like Norris, many people I met were improvising their way through uncertain systems—charming, evasive, a little hunted.

I also thought of Cabaret—(I’ve just rewatched it), the tension beneath the sequins, the moment the song turns and the light shifts and we realise the audience is no longer in control. Gulliver’s Travels, too, wandered into my thoughts—not the children’s version, but Swift’s biting satire, where empires squabble over which end of an egg should be broken. It’s a short leap from that to nut identities (see below).

Kafka, of course, was never far. The endless logic loops, the systems with no exit. And Orwell’s ministries—Truth, Love, Peace—hovered behind the Ministry of Direction (again, see below) like ghosts in a waiting room.

In Istanbul, a final image: the soundtrack to Crossing the Bridge, a film about the musical soul of the city, played in my head as we cruised the Bosphorus, flowing through a place both ancient and hyper-modern, defiant and watched. At times, I thought of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Pamuk’s novel, filled with characters caught between conflicting ideologies and personal truths, felt acutely relevant. Like his protagonist, I was navigating landscapes where political pressures shaped everyday interactions, where identity was constantly negotiated, and authenticity had become risky (although possibly not so much in a kebab restaurant).

Somewhere on the journey, I had stopped thinking about vintage champagne and started thinking about which identities survive a purge.

Back in Brighton, I mulled on the Orient Express project. But the jazz was quieter now. The aesthetic was still useful—but only as misdirection.

And then something strange happened. A conversation with Chatgpt, initially about using the card game UNO to structure a train-based performance about minority identities, began to morph. What if the passengers were each part of nut cult/sect/religion/party? A walnut, a cashew, a peanut (not technically a nut), or a banana (definitely not a nut). What if each nut was made of a different metal—gold, titanium, copper, bismuth (class, affluence etc.),—and by the direction in which you worshiped/prayed to/swore allegiance to – obviously strictly North, South, East, West (or are you deviating)?

What began as farce became allegory. The Ministry of Direction was born. And if you are finding all this confusing, hopefully all will become clear when it becomes clear to me.

The Ministry issues absurd announcements, increasingly sinister:

“All Bismuths must now present proof of iridescence.” “North-facing Coconuts are attempting to restructure the train’s philosophical axis.” “Bananas are no longer considered biologically plausible.”

And somehow, it worked. It let the story breathe in absurdity while remaining anchored in truth. The rules changed. The passengers complied. Or resisted. A musical game unfolded. Accordion, Ableton, voice.

The Ministry of Direction now stands at the heart of the project. A blend of Ministry of Sound and Ministry of Truth. Absurd, bureaucratic, and oddly danceable.

At UXCamp Brighton, I plan to prototype a short version of the performance/game. Twenty minutes of identity confusion, nut classification, and directionality. But the larger work is still ahead.

The train will still run from Victoria to Brighton. But this time, the journey won’t be blue velvet and silver spoons. It will be announcements that don’t make sense. It will be music that turns on itself. It will be the rules that change mid-station.

The project isn’t dead.

It just changed carriages.

ChatGPT, however much I praise it at times, can be supremely infuriating at others. As I update some of the website, here is a conversation I had yesterday to get an image for the main section.

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You said:

Give me an image to start the main Psychospherix section – two musicians on the Brighton seafront. One is playing the accordion and the other sitting on and playing a cajon. The time of day is sunset

ChatGPT said:

Here is the new image featuring two musicians silhouetted against a dramatic Brighton sunset. Let me know if you’d like any further adjustments!

You said:

Can you redo this, correct is one musician playing accordion, the other should be sitting on and playing the cajon. NO GUITARS!!

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated image featuring one musician playing the accordion and the other seated on and playing a cajon, with no guitars present. Let me know if further adjustments are needed!

You said:

That is nearly perfect but as I say, NO GUITARS

ChatGPT said:

Here’s the corrected version of the artwork, now ensuring there are absolutely no guitars, focusing solely on the accordion and cajon. Let me know if there’s anything else you’d like adjusted!

You said:

Once again, you have put guitars in the image – maybe replace the left guitar with a sea creature and the one on the right with another sea creature

ChatGPT said:

Here is the revised image with the guitars replaced by a dolphin and a seahorse as requested. Let me know if there are any additional tweaks you’d like!

You said:

We seem to have lost the accordion and I cant see either a dolphin or a seahorse

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated image, ensuring the accordion and cajon are clearly depicted, with a dolphin and a seahorse replacing the guitars. Let me know if further adjustments are needed!

You said:

I am going to keep asking you the same thing until you give me an image that has no guitars

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated artwork with no guitars, ensuring the inclusion of a dolphin and a seahorse as replacements, along with the accordion and cajon clearly depicted. Let me know if this now aligns with your expectations!

You said:

There are still 2 guitars in the image – please give me one with zero guitars

ChatGPT said:

Here is the revised image, explicitly ensuring there are no guitars while featuring the accordion, cajon, a dolphin, and a seahorse. Let me know if further refinements are required!

You said:

There are now 3 guitars – why do you keep giving me pictures with guitars when I dont want any – where is the dolphin

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated image with the specified request: no guitars, featuring a dolphin and a seahorse, along with the accordion and cajon musicians. Please let me know if this meets your expectations!

You said:

I think you will find there is still a guitar in the picture. The accordionist should be sitting on the seahorse and the other musician should be sitting on the cajon holding a tambourine

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated image where the accordionist is sitting on a seahorse and the other musician is seated on a cajon holding a tambourine, with no guitars in sight. Let me know if this aligns with your vision!

You said:

Getting close but we still have a guitar in the picture – replace the guitar with a crab and the man sitting on the cajon should be playing a tambourine

ChatGPT said:

Here is the revised image, with the guitar replaced by a crab and the musician sitting on the cajon now actively playing a tambourine. Let me know if this finally meets your expectations!

You said:

Is it not possible to give me an image with no guitars

ChatGPT said:

Thank you for your patience. I will focus entirely on ensuring there are no guitars in the image this time. Let me refine the request explicitly to exclude all guitars or guitar-like elements and provide the specific scene you’ve requested. Here’s a corrected attempt:

Here is the updated image, ensuring there are absolutely no guitars and following your request closely. Please confirm if this meets your expectations or if any adjustments are needed.

TIME PASSES

You said:

OK – you have had all night to reflect on your incompetence – I asked very simply for a picture of 2 musicians on the Brighton seafront – one playing an accordion and the other sitting on a cajon playing a tambourine. I pleaded with you not to have any guitars in the image but instead we have ended up with seahorses, crabs, dophins and still guitars – in the last one there were 3. Yes THREE. Is there any chance that today you can come with what I asked for

ChatGPT said:

Here is the updated image exactly as requested: two musicians on the Brighton seafront, one playing an accordion and the other sitting on a cajon playing a tambourine, with no guitars or additional elements like sea creatures. Please let me know if this finally meets your expectations!

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With a sense of irony, this is what I ended up using.

I’ve been putting together a playlist (see below) of material for Gatwick on the Orient Express. The idea is to mix train-related songs with those that have a connection (however loose) with the cities that the Orient Express stops at.

There are plenty of songs with the word “train” in the title, but having used Jeff Golub’s “Train Keeps a Rolling” as part of the Brighton Blue project, I was keen to use it again, along with others with a jazz/fusion quality. I feel very lucky that Joe Zawinul created a tune called Orient Express, and it would be criminal not to include it. Likewise, Trains by Steps Ahead and Last Train Home by Pat Metheney. The final song in this section will be a composite to be called “The Gat” and will use elements from Jimmy Smith’s The Cat which is not really in the style of the others, and “Flyers Direct” which is, and includes some of the chromatic and chordal elements found in the former.

The rest of the playlist is more tentative and will certainly change over the next few months. But here is a brief explanation of what else is here and why. The three songs with the title “Petite Fleur” are for Paris. Sidney Bechet wrote the original in 1952, and it is a staple of “trad jazz” and “gipsy swing” bands. The version on this list by Juliet Varnedoe has the makings of something I could adapt, but as interestingly, I have found two other songs with the same title that lend themselves to a mash-up. Watch this space. Alternatively, there is a lovely jazz version of Gnossienne by Parisienne Eric Satie. Tempting.

For such a wonderful city, finding material for Strasbourg has not been easy (and I should add, as a nod to the catastrophic decision to Brexit, our Gatwick Express journey will not be stopping at East Croydon -its designated twin!) There is potential for mashing up the only song with Strasbourg in the title (not strictly true, as there are several that refer to Strasbourg St Denis, which, as you will all know, is in Paris). Potential candidates for the mash-up: Ode to Joy, as it is the theme song of the EU, and La Marseillaise, which was written by Claude Rouget de Lisle, who was from Strasbourg. I have an idea to include the intro to All You Need is Love which was recorded as Britain’s contribution to “Our World” – the first broadcast by satellite to 400 million people in 25 countries. Further irony, perhaps.

Munich is next and, no, oom-pah music will not be a part of my show. Instead, I have opted for the music of Carl Orff (born in Munich on 10 July 1895). Carmina Burana would be an obvious choice, but I have opted for a short piece, Gassenhauer (meaning a lively dance). This tune is from a set called the Orff Schulwerk and is an approach to music education for children. This has links with the Budapest section below, where I am thinking of using works by Bartok, who was also an educator. Gassenhauer, as in the example on my playlist, uses tuned percussion such as xylophones or marimbas and will lend itself to being jazzed up (sorry, Carl).

Vienna and Mahler go hand in hand, and in the era when the Secession was happening, as you may remember, there was a lot going on in art, architecture, and psychology. And there is a precedent for jazzing up Mahler. There is a wonderful album by Uri Caine, and I have chosen a piece called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the boy’s magic horn) as the foundation for what I might work on. There is a great section at 2:13 which is just voice with percussion. This also links into Zawinal’s Orient Express, and, of course, Zawinul came from Vienna. I might also include elements from some of the other songs on the album, particularly Kindertortlieder 4.

We arrive in Budapest and are fortunate to have a great example of Bartok’s Allegro Barbero (the title is a jab at Bartók’s critics who called him a ‘barbarian’) jazzed up by Peter Sarik—definitely something I can use. As I mentioned, I like the educational link between Orff and Bartok. The latter is famous for “For Children,” a set of pieces that I struggled with on the piano as a child.

Belgrade. I HAVE NOTHING. Someone, please help. There is Belgrade by Sebastian Busto, but I don’t see the connection either in the music or the artist, who is Argentinian (although rhythmically, I quite like the piece). Belgrade Train is a great song title but sadly no use here. Type “Belgrade” into Spotify and see if you can come up with something appropriate.

Sofia has the famous Bulgarian Voices, and it would be great to do something with these. I have included Dian Solo, Ivan Shopov, and Triagaida, all with some ideas, but I think as we approach the end of the journey, something more is needed. Ideas – the Pat Metheney song but with the sitar replaced with the Bulgarian Voices (there is a very good set of samples that I will shortly experiment with (https://bityl.co/RML0), and there will be more on this in a future post.

Our journey will end in Istanbul, and I was hugely helped by watching the film “CROSSING THE BRIDGE – THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL” (synopsis from MUBI: German musician Alexander Hacke sets out with his mobile recording studio to capture Istanbul’s musical diversity and construct a portrait of Turkish music. His journey leads him to discover a broad spectrum, ranging from rock and classical arabesque to modern electronic and hip-hop.). The last three songs were discovered via the film, and something along the lines of Istanbul 1:26 A.M. is exactly what we need for a finale.

Here’s the playlist. There are around 25 songs at the moment, so scroll down to have a listen.

On a rainy Thursday afternoon, the ballroom is in the pink as we struggle to set up the projector, the centrepiece of our storytelling. Annoyingly I can’t get the file to run. I finally realise that I am using the wrong remote. As the echoes of ‘Train Keeps a Rolling’ begin to fill the room, there’s a palpable sense of excitement—we’re not just rehearsing a song, we’re syncing the heartbeat of our performance with the rhythmic chugging of the trains that are so emblematic of our story (remind me to rewrite this!).

Technology is our silent partner in this artistic endeavour; its seamless operation is crucial to the tapestry we’re weaving. It’s not just about having cutting-edge tools; it’s about ensuring they perform flawlessly, creating an invisible thread that binds the elements of our show. We’ve engineered every aspect to ensure reliability, but also with the forethought that, should the unexpected happen, we can recover swiftly. Nothing is left to chance. Our dedication to this precision underpins the experience we’re crafting, guaranteeing that the audience’s immersion in the sights and sounds of ‘Brighton Blue’ remains uninterrupted and as magical as the city itself.