Play & See: Hospital Edition
For years my performance practice has centred on my live-visuals system, reacting in real time in response to what I play. In 2025 I started asking what would happen if anyone could try it, not just watch. The result was the first iteration of Play & See, which premiered at Arnolfini Bristol.
Through support from Bath Spa’s Studio Innovation Fund, I partnered with Art at the Heart of the RUH and their musician-in-residence, Frankie Simpkins.
We were also fortunate to cross paths with Designability , who brought their accessibility-design expertise to build the physical housing: a unit that can be wheeled around the ward and reads as welcoming to children rather than clinical.
Play & See: Hospital Edition is a portable, single-user experience built for inpatients with no prior musical experience. You can play it with a keyboard, or wirelessly through a Skoog cube or iPad, making it usable for patients who’d struggle with a traditional keyboard.
I’ve been piloting the unit on the RUH Children’s Ward since July, and the feedback from patients, families and staff has been fantastic. In regular weekly use with musician-in-residence Frankie Simpkins, it’s held attention for an average of 73% of every session — some visits filling the full slot — with every one of its nine interactive scenes explored.
I love it a lot.
Patients have found the experience fun, engaging and different to anything they’ve experienced in hospital before — and the Play Specialist team love how versatile and accessible it is, from toddlers to adolescents.
Play and See takes away some of that initial pressure — it gives them something exciting and novel to explore, without the expectation that they have to engage with me. I've loved seeing children play a piano for the very first time, with parents telling me they'd never played one before.
Therapeutic Framework
“Play & See” is a hugely impressive project that has the potential to impact positively on young people’s confidence & self-esteem, emotional processing & expression and general wellbeing. In a hospital setting it can also offer crucial opportunities for creativity and even interaction & relationship-building.
Play & See’s Hospital Edition has been assessed by a licensed music therapist to have the potential for several positive therapeutic outcomes:
- Engagement could provide positive impacts on participants’ confidence, self-esteem and general mood & wellbeing.
- Developing relationships through interaction with others - e.g. playing in pairs could help to develop relationships. This could also help decrease feelings of isolation and loneliness.
- Focusing on engagement and play could help participants to regulate behaviour & emotions and express feelings - musically, as well as verbally when explaining how the experience makes them feel.
- Motor skills and coordination: play could help participants with a range of physical difficulties to develop strength, coordination and flexibility.
- Levels of concentration and focus could improve through strong motivation to play and explore.
- Creativity: the experience offers participants the opportunity to be creative and challenge themselves.
Find Out More
We’re now talking to other hospitals and organisations about hosting their own unit. A detailed information pack — including the results above — is available here :
If that’s you, get in touch .
Play & See is proud to acknowledge development support from The Studio Innovation Fund 2026:
