Remember the GLOSS program, the collection of recorded sounds from the Percy Grainger Home and Studio in White Plains, NY. The sounds include samples of instruments in the collection, and ambient sounds from the house and neighborhood.
GLOSS now has a new name and a new website: GlossGlide.
GlossGlide is an exploratory project inspired by Grainger’s ideas of continuous change, domestic sound, and inclusive participation. It brings together interactive sound environments (“Glides”), research resources, and evolving experiments that invite listening without targets or expertise.
GlossGlide began as a way of rethinking Grainger’s ideas about “gliding sound” and Free Music for contemporary digital contexts. Rather than treating these ideas as historical artefacts, GlossGlide treats them as resources – materials that can be activated, explored, and re-imagined through interaction. It is the work of an autistic practitioner, developed through sustained individual practice and reflection.
The project brings together sound, interaction, and accessibility to explore what it might mean to engage with musical materials through continuous change, attention, and play, rather than through finished works or fixed outcomes. GlossGlide is deliberately experimental. It is concerned as much with process as with product, and with creating conditions for listening and interaction that are open-ended, calm, and low-pressure.
This meeting, hosted by Paul Jackson, in conversation with GlossGlide developer Andrew Hugill, introduces the new site, its development and context, and the ways in which it might be used to stimulate engagement with, and creative responses to, the sounds contained in the Grainger Home and Studio.
Join us to help determine next steps for GlossGlide, as we seek to balance visionary experimentation with sustainable practice in the next phase of the Grainger the Educator program.
Grainger the Educator
This meeting continues the Percy Grainger Society’s 2025–26 members’ meeting series, Grainger the Educator, a celebration of Percy Grainger’s often overlooked yet enduring influence as a teacher and educator. This three-part series seeks to illuminate Grainger’s innovative educational approach and spirit in a variety of settings, including his work at the National Music Camp, Interlochen, and his lecture series for New York University, and for the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
Andrew Hugill is a retired Professor, composer, musicologist, and creative technologist whose career spans nearly forty years across music, technology, and creative research. At Leicester Polytechnic/De Montfort University, he founded the Music, Technology and Innovation program and the Institute of Creative Technologies, later establishing the Creative Computing research centers at Bath Spa University and the University of Leicester. Since 2025, he has been a Visiting Research Professor in the School of Music at the University of Leeds. Prof. Hugill has received numerous teaching and research awards and is both a National Teaching Fellow and Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. His research explores aural diversity, creativity, and disability, informed by his own experiences of autism, hearing, and balance disorders. He founded the Aural Diversity Network and, since 2023, has been the lead on GLOSS, an innovative project connecting music, accessibility, and digital creativity.
Paul Jackson is a pianist, conductor, musicologist, lecturer, and education consultant based in Cambridge, UK. A graduate of the University of East Anglia and City University, he studied piano with John York and conducting with Alan Hazeldine at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He holds a PhD in Musicology and a PGCE in Post-Compulsory Education from Anglia Ruskin University, where he served as Head of Music and Performing Arts and Director of Music and Performance from 1998 to 2018. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he has taught widely across performance, composition, technology, and musicology. Active as both pianist and conductor, he performs with ensembles including the Mifune Tsuji Trio, the Newtown Ensemble, and the St Augustine’s Singers. An authority on Percy Grainger, he is Editor of The Grainger Journal, President of the Percy Grainger Society, and, since 2023, has been co-lead on the GLOSS project.