Presentation on Thursday 4th of October, 7pm.

Alex Allmont’s playful LEGO musical sculptures draw upon the tipping points in nature. Exploring the boundaries between dissonance and consonance, stability and instability, his pieces offer an opportunity to consciously untangle complex systems. They aim to capture and sustain the moment of realisation, where overwhelming detail melts away into simplicity.

His current research at Oxford Brookes focuses this attention to complexity onto rhythmic structure, in particular the moments of synchrony when the brain determines that a rhythm is ‘consonant’ as opposed to a dissonant flurry of events. An exploration of polyrhythms in traditional drumming and phasing effects of composers such as Reich has led to the development of mechanical, software and electronic tools to engage with rhythm indirectly. These playful approaches allow a performer to explore and sculpt rhythm freely, relaxing the boundaries between them and the audience.

This in turn led to questions about the relationship between the audience and performer, and in recent work this is  addressed by removing the performer altogether. The music is generative but the character of performance comes through; the artist existing as a meta-performer with the audience picking apart the music by mechanical proxy.  By being absent there is no rallying into context, the audience is not confronted by ego and is allowed a more personal exploration of sound.

Alex’s LEGO work has shown at BEAM, Raven Row, the Museum of the History of Science, the Mechanical Art and Design museum, Kinetica and Festival of the Spoken Nerd.  His most recent work is being developed for Kinetica 2013.

Alex will be talking about the practicalities of developing machines within the constraints of LEGO and how this playful constraint can lead to happy accidents.  Examples of various actuators and means of introducing pseudo-randomness will then be used to demo the electronic and software principles used to connect these machines to instruments, using transducers and AVR microcontrollers.

This early work-in-progress is being developed for Kinetica 2013, so Alex will talk about some earlier work and it’s motives and how this relates to his current research and his non-LEGO projects.

Videos

We’ve been invited by the Shoreditch Sisters Women’s Institute group to participate in one of their monthly events, in this occasion a music and science themed meeting (https://www.facebook.com/events/121138904700346)

So next Tuesday 25th of September, we’re having a Music Hackspace presentation followed by demos.

The event also includes a talk by Guerilla Science about the evolution of music.

Tuesday, 25 September 2012 at 19:00
Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club
42 Pollard Street London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London E2

 

Presentation on Thursday 20th of September 2012, 7pm.

My name is Tim Murray-Browne and I’m greatly honoured to have been invited to spend the next ten months within the Music Hackspace as resident composer under Sound and Music’s embedded composer residency programme. During this time I am proposing to explore the concept of ensemble within the musical hacking culture. In Thursday’s talk I will introduce myself, discuss why I think ensemble and hacking are ideas that should be explored together and invite members of the space to be involved in creating an installation-ensemble of musical interfaces over the next ten months.

My background mixes engineering, art and music. I recently completed a PhD at the Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London researching what drives us to make, spectate and play with new musical interfaces and interactive sound works. I believe that music hacking is an act of musical expression in much the same way as composition or performance. New musical interfaces provide us the opportunity to compose not just in the medium of sound but as action causing sound.

But with individuals designing, composing for and performing their musical instrument, where does this leave the art of ensemble composition? Can a composer unite the divergent and idiosyncratic voices into the unity we hear from a string quartet? Or does the hacker culture show up the very idea of a composer dictating who may do what as an outdated relic of the industrial age? Music hackers often appear mavericks trying to escape established conventions. But they are near universal in their desire to share what they have created, listen to each other and perform together. It is as much a collective activity as any other musical practice.

Making music together provides a space to explore our relationships with each other, what happens when we unite into a collective and our identity within that group. Over the next ten months I will be forming a Hackspace ensemble of musical interfaces created together with the ultimate aim of being harmonious components within a single installation. Musical hackers have a slight tendency to be mavericks. But just as the different parts within an ensemble form their own voice and role, I hope that the different personalities of those involved and the dynamics of the group will be reflected within final installation that we create.

I’ll be spending ten weeks spread over the next ten months working within the Music Hackspace and hope to have the opportunity to work with the whole spectrum of its members. Throughout, I’ll be seeking to find and further points of cohesion within the group without imposing upon each individual’s creative space. We will undoubtedly learn a lot from each other but I can also be more actively involved where people need help (musical or technical) to make things happen. I don’t anticipate that everyone will be able to make strong time commitments but I’d like to persuade everyone who might be interested in exploring new ways of creating sound with others to get involved early on. There aren’t too many conventions for what we are doing and I think the format gives us flexibility regarding how extensive anyone’s involvement is.

Hope to see you there on Thursday!

We went to the seaside on the weekend to show our stuff at the Brighton Mini Maker Faire. Zoë Blade caught us on camera.

After the faire, exhausted but happy, we performed with the Music Hackspace Big Band at the after party, along with a bunch of other acts.

Great times were had by all, not least thanks to the fantastically helpful volunteers – big thanks to you all and the organisers!