Every year, creative grad students from across the disciplines submit compelling images of their research and scholarship to the Image of Research competition. To accompany each image submission, the creator writes a short paragraph explaining how the image relates to their wider academic work, giving us a glimpse behind the scenes.
We caught up with some of the award winners from the 2025 Image of Research competition to ask them more about their process. Enjoy this interview with Xavier Davenport, a graduate student in Music and Honorable Mention winner in this year’s contest, and then view the video to hear Davenport read his award-winning submission, "The Spinductor: A Multi-Dimensional Magnetic Field Neural Network Enhanced Musical Instrument!"
Why did you enter Image of Research this year?
I entered the Image of Research competition mostly as a way to develop my ability to effectively and concisely explain what I’m doing, as well as promote myself and my work. I tend to write in a rather dull and dry style which can occasionally make it challenging to obtain funding for my projects, and I’ve always been nervous and awkward when it comes to promoting my own work. Judging by how I placed in this year’s competition, I think I’ve improved quite a bit!
What was the process of coming up with your image?
Music is a notoriously difficult topic to effectively capture in a still image. I think of music fundamentally as a phenomenon involving the air around us compressing and expanding rapidly, and this sort of periodic motion is happening over time. Air and time are both rather difficult to represent in a photograph. The instrument in my image is operated by moving magnets to warp the magnetic field around the instrument – another challenging physical phenomenon to photograph. I wanted to find a way to represent the motion of magnetic fields through time and space. To do that, I scotch-taped some glow-sticks to the front and back of my hands, each of the four colors representing a different magnet and polarity. Then I just waved my hands around while a friend of mine named Ti Zhang took a long exposure photograph!
What did you learn or take away from this experience?
The most shocking thing about this experience has been the realization that the amount of work put into a project has almost nothing to do with how interested people will be in the outcome. In total, I believe I dedicated three hours to entering this competition, one each to planning the photo, taking the photo, and writing the accompanying text. For months now, I’ve received congratulations, my work has been shared and promoted by several units throughout campus, the College of Fine & Applied Arts posted a spotlight article on me, and now there’s this interview! It has been an unexpectedly wild ride.
Read Xavier's entry
The spinductor is an instrument which allows the performer to hold or wear magnets and gesture in and around the instrument to control sounds. Controllable sound parameters could include things like pitch, rhythm, density, and especially tone color. Rather than being an instrument of precision, the many coupled dimensions of data are fed through a neural network, producing a parameter space that is explorable by altering the magnetic field throughout the instrument. There are also electromagnetic coils on the spinductor which can pulse, providing a sensation of haptic feedback for the performer to push and pull against without needing to touch the instrument! This image is a dramatic depiction of how a player might gesture with magnets around the spinductor and perform with the magnetic field.
Visit the Image of Research website for more information about this celebration of graduate student research.
This interview was conducted by Brandon Stauffer, Videographer here at the Graduate College. Brandon came to the Graduate College with a background in journalism and is now working to showcase the impact of Higher Education at Illinois.
