The Numbiano — music by numbers, music for all
TEDx Frome, at the Merlin Theatre. The origin story of the system: why numbers and colours open music to everyone.
Live experiences
A hundred phones.
One song.
A Numbiano live experience turns an audience into a band. Everyone plays, everyone sings, and by the end the room has written a song together — on the phones already in their pockets.
45–90 minfrom arrival to finale
20–500+players, any age
0 downloadsscan and play in the browser
How it works
From strangers to a band in four steps.
1
Gather
A hall, a festival tent, a school gym, a street. Anywhere people can stand together and hear a PA is a venue.
2
Scan
A QR code goes up on the screen. Every phone becomes a Numbiano instrument in the browser — no app store, no accounts, no downloads.
3
Play
The leader sets the Tonal Centre and teaches the numbers in minutes. Melody on one side of the room, harmony on the other — and suddenly it works.
4
Perform
Together, the room writes a song — and then performs it. That moment, when hundreds of people realise what they just made, is the whole point.
We spend all day being told phones pull people apart.
This is the hour that proves they don't have to.
From the TEDx stage
The idea, told twice.
Collective songwriting — musicians without borders
TEDx Phnom Penh. Why writing a song together changes a room — the method behind every Numbiano live experience.
Four ways to bring Numbiano to your people.
Community & family events
Libraries, fetes, family festivals, community halls. A shared hour where parents and children play the same instrument for once — the "turn a bad into a good" experience in its purest form.
EnquireFestivals & venues
A takeover slot that makes the audience the act. Scales to hundreds of players with big-screen visuals, and hands the festival a moment nobody films from the outside — because everyone's in it.
EnquireConferences
Open your conference by turning five hundred delegates into one band before the first keynote. The most talked-about twenty minutes of any programme — and the only icebreaker nobody has to be dragged into.
EnquireSchools & organisations
Assemblies, transition days, massed singing projects, and away-days for teams, charities and community groups of every kind. Delivered by a working musician and serving music teacher.
EnquirePhoto of Andy leading a session goes here — mid-performance, crowd of raised phones in view
Your leader
Led by the person who invented it.
Andy Hawkings is a working musician, a music teacher, a two-time TEDx speaker and the inventor of Numbiano. He has spent his career on both sides of the music stand — performing as a gigging musician and getting rooms full of people, from reception classes to massed school choirs, singing and playing together — and Numbiano is that career distilled into a system anyone can pick up in minutes. He has sold out Somerset's largest music venue with a previous project and told the Numbiano story on TEDx stages in the UK and Cambodia.
Every experience is built on real pedagogy: moveable-do, Kodály-inspired singing, and a notation of numbers and colours with no barrier to entry. It works because it's not a gimmick — it's how music actually teaches.
Looking further ahead: trained, licensed Numbiano facilitators will deliver experiences across the country. If leading one yourself sounds like your kind of work, say so when you get in touch.