What happens to a charming Parisian factory when it stops making cardboard? It hosts a Hackathon! They called it Music Hack Paris.

Although cardboard was not involved, laptops weren’t the only tools to be seen. The hackers made sonic sculptures, jammed with old and new musical instruments, and played table football. There being around 100 hackers involved, by the end of the event you pretty much had had a chance to chat with most people. It felt cosy, and the factory’s authentic 19th century furniture and workrooms gave the event a magical atmosphere that many hackathon held in concrete blocks tend to lack.

The projects people worked on included a healthy amount of web apps, among them some very impressive music visualisers, and an app that could get a song to be played in perfect sync on three different computers, with the user being able to control each computer’s EQ. There were also physical interfaces presented, among them was the Dualo, a fingerboard interface offering clever music theory shortcuts, a musical carpet, and a mouth-controlled wah-wah pedal (now it’s no longer an onomatopoeia). I had the chance to accompany the latter with beatbox during a couple of jams and performances, and also participated in a collaborative loop-making web app. Many people brought instruments to the event, and beautiful jams began sprouting.

Chapeau (hats off to) the organisers: the Google Cultural Institute, JoshFire, the UNESCO, and the Cartonnerie staff. They got so many things right. Splendid venue, great selection of speakers for the lightning talks (including yours truly on behalf of the London Music Hackspace), table football, solid wifi, comfy couches, and what was probably the finest food ever served at a Hack event: croissants, scrambled eggs, pancakes, ah, we felt loved. They even kicked off the demos with a video message of Herbie Hancock himself, giving us his blessing for making creative tools for musicians.

Herbie, our pleasure.

Check out the latest pictures, sounds and videos of the event on the event’s home page:
http://www.musichackparis.org/

Thursday 26th of April 2012.

The SOLARIS project uses painted discs to create music and is led by French artist Thierry Guibert. Thierry crafts beautiful graphics  on vinyls. These vinyls are used on a special set of turntables, where the diamond stylus is replaced by a  camera to capture images as the disc spins mechanically. The aim of the presentation is to workshop strategies for using visuals to control music events. A few musical examples will be presented.The goal of this project is to create musical content for each disc, allowing to perform with a revisited DJ set, and adding to the performance beautiful and meaningful visuals.

 

Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut works with Thierry on this project, to analyse the images captured by the camera and to produce musical results.  The visuals are analysed with the OpenCV library of OpenFrameworks, and the data is shared among applications using OSC.

The video below shows how the image flow is analysed in ‘blobs’ (using contour detection). These blobs may have different sizes, which is shown on the right side of the video.  For each blob, an average colour is calculated. At every frame of the video correspond a number of blobs, which can be used to create sounds.

Last week, we received a visit by Nicholas O’Brien, a sound engineer embarking on a cycling journey in Europe to record artists along the way. We hope to see Nicholas when he’s back to the UK and wish him a great experience! You can follow his adventures on his blog: http://record-and-ride.com/

We will be following his journey and reporting when we can the interesting musicians he will encounter.

Below is a video of the man himself and a few recordings he made in London.

SuperCollider is an interpreted music environment developed by James McCartney in 1996. It was open-sourced in 2002 when McCartney joined Apple. Since then, SuperCollider has been adopted by a growing community of musicians-developers.

In April 2012, Queen Mary University joined forces with Goldsmiths and City Universities to organise a London symposium. The event featured artistic installations, seminars, talks, concerts and even a dubstep remix competition, with a coverage from the BBC.

Shelly Knotts and Les Hutchins gave us an overview of their work with SuperCollider. They  share musical data through the network and perform with the Birmingham Laptop Ensemble (BiLE). This is one of the very interesting advantage of SuperCollider, its client/server architecture facilitates collaboration and remote jamming. Musicians send each other data and create music locally instead of sending audio signal to the network. SuperCollider is so lightweight that Dan Stowell et al. made an album using 140-characters Tweets in form of SuperCollider instructions (sc140)!

A very interesting night indeed, with pizza and Martin’s warm Stout.

Here is what a SuperCollider environment looks like:

Pauline filmed this short documentary at the last Music Hackday in London, December 2011.This documentary reflects well the atmosphere of Music Hackdays as well as that of the Hackspace. Well done to her!

A Hackday from Pauline de Zeeuw on Vimeo.