Join us on Thursday 6 June, Andrew McPherson from the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London will be talking about TouchKeys, a capactive multi-touch musical keyboard.

Where: Troyganic Café, 132 Kingsland Road, London, E2 8DY

When: 6 June 2013, 7.30pm

The TouchKeys are a DIY sensor kit for adding multi-touch sensing to any piano keyboard. Capacitive sensor overlays measure the XY position and contact area of the fingers on the key surfaces (up to 3 touches per key). Touch data can be flexibly mapped by OSC and MIDI, creating a wide variety of new expressive capabilities including vibrato and pitch bends on each note, real-time control of timbre, or microtonal tunings. This event will combine a presentation/demo of the TouchKeys capabilities with a hands-on hacking session to develop new uses for the sensor data.

More information and demo videos can be found at http://touchkeys.org

Music Hackspace presents an evening of sound art and performances with Thickear, Leafcutter John + Blanca Regina and Astma Duo:

23rd May 2013 | 8pm-11pm | Troyganic Café, 132 Kingsland Road, LONDON, E2 8DY

Free Entry

20:00-21:00 Thickear

21:15-21:45 Leafcutter John + Blanca Regina

22:00-23:00 ASTMA

Thickear are a collective of sonic artists exploring sound through performance, technology and exhibition. Originally formed from Sound Arts M.A. alumni,  Thickear’s live performance events combine individual and group works to examine a common theme or concern, often with imaginative, touching and funny results.

Geoff Howse, Jack James and Kevin Logan will perform new and revised works, and will speak about making sound art with technology and how this shapes their own particular approach to each work.

This programme follows from recent performances at the Music Tech Fest 2013 and gives a prelude to future collaborations with the Music Hackspace, including new works at the Barbican as part of a festival line-up organised by The Trampery in association with the Barbican Arts Centre. More info: thickear.org

Leafcutter John and Blanca Regina will perform a set of live audiovisual improvisations, combining images, sound and texture in an electronic music jam.

And from the experimental Russian noise scene, ASTMA is formed by drummer and vocalist Olga Nosova and Russian industrial/electronic scene pioneer Alexei Borisov. Described as an act that tributes ‘too many different types of acoustic torture to even bother mentioning them’, ASTMA will be performing live electronic, acoustic, field recordings, and spoken word impro.

 

 

Thursday 16 May 2013
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road
8pm

Join us this Thursday to experience The Cave of Sounds at the Music Hackspace.

Daniel Lopez demonstrates his instrument The Animal Kingdom, part of The Cave of Sounds installation at Hack the Barbican Bazaar, 28 March 2013.

 

This Thursday the Hackspace Ensemble will be taking over the Music Hackspace with our work-in-progress installation The Cave of Sounds. This is an interactive installation with eight bespoke musical interfaces created for audience participation. Have a look at the summary for last week’s talk for more details about what it involves.

This will be an informal test and demo as a part of preparations for our exhibition at Music Tech Fest over the weekend. If you’re about either on Thursday or at Music Tech Festival please come along, have a go and let us know what you think. I’ll also be giving a talk about the project at Music Tech Fest on Friday at 5pm (tickets are still available at the time of writing).

It’s work in progress be prepared for a few glitches. Feedback will be especially welcome.

Tim Murray-Browne
Music Hackspace Composer in Residence

Thursday 9nd of May 2013
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road
7pm

Summary

This Thursday evening, I will be giving an update of my activities here as the Music Hackspace’s Composer in Residence.

Since November I have been working with a group of Music Hackspace members on the Ensemble Project to investigate the nature of collaboration within music hacking. Over the course of the ten month residency, each of us in this group is creating a hacked musical instrument to be showcased as a single work this summer.

Crucial to this process has been regularly meeting up, listening to and experimenting with each other’s work and responding through our own creations.

The Cave of Sounds is the outcome of this process and its form has gradually emerged alongside the identity of the group. As an interactive sound installation inviting audience members to experiment and connect through these new musical interfaces, it is an exploration into the prehistoric origins of music and its power to bind individual identities together.

In this presentation, I will discuss both the process we’ve been through and the resulting installation itself including considerations of interaction design and our efforts to magnify the collaborative experience for our audience through a system of subtle inter-instrumental communications.

Website: http://timmb.com