On Thursday 22nd of March, Martin Malii-Karlsson will present “Recycled Tunes: making hits out of Rubbish”

To promote sustainability and recycling to young people using music and social media.

We want to build a sound/lyrics/visual bank/radio of recycled material open for people to share and mash up.

Plus pull in data from ex twitter about peoples thoughts about sustainability.

http://recycledtunes.org/?page_id=4

 

Short fundraising video

 

Longer Pilot video

On Thursday the 15th of March, Guy John will talk and answer questions about PatchWerk Radio.

PatchWerk Radio is a generative music internet radio station that streams constantly changing audio twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It is built with Pure Data at its heart and wrapped in Python to help make things a bit more manageable. The project lives at http://patchwerk.rumblesan.com and all the code, including the patches themselves can be found at the github repository.

The server has a bank of patches from which it will choose a new one randomly every 10 minutes at which point the old patch will cross fade into the new and the stream carries on, uninterrupted.

The talk will aim to cover the internal architecture of the radio station, some thoughts on Pure Data as a server side process, a brief introduction into generative music and hopefully the basics of creating patches to run on PatchWerk.

 

On Thursday 1st of March, Jagannathan will present din is noise: a Free software musical instrument.

From Jag’s website:

“If Puredata and Supercollider are two synths,
din is a synth of a 3rd kind.

It forgets history,
To not repeat it.

It doesnt hide analog music hardware,
In digital music software.”

 

 

Andrew McPherson (Queen Mary, University of London) will present his work extending and enhancing the piano keyboard. The presentation will include a live demo of a multi-touch capacitive sensor system to detect the location of fingers on the key surfaces. The system can be installed on any acoustic or electronic keyboard, giving the player multiple dimensions of continuous control over each note.

The evening will also include a short video demo of the magnetic resonator piano (MRP), an electronically-augmented acoustic grand piano that uses electromagnets to induce vibrations in the piano strings. Both of these projects aim to preserve the traditional advantages of the piano (polyphony, tactile feedback, rich acoustic sound source) while adding new dimensions of musical control.

The evening (9/02/2012, 7pm) will be a retrospective look at ‘traditional’ analogue synthesis systems, with some demonstrations and comparison between a pre-configured vintage hardware analogue synthesizer (probably a Roland SH101) and a modular analogue synthesizer (Blacet Research kit). Why the vintage synth is arranged as it is, and how you would emulate this arrangement with the modular.

Discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of pre-configured and modular systems, and also the influence that these systems have had on music software packages and software synthesizers. Comparisons between analogue and digital synthesis systems in terms of sound quality and operation. Also, If anyone has analogue synthesizer instruments (particularly +5v CV/gate systems) that they would like to bring along, they would be most welcome – we’ll have a small mixer/speaker arrangement, and I’m sure that we can figure out a way to hook everything up 😀

Bioni Samp demonstrates his Hive Synthesiser on 16/02/2012, 7pm.

Talks about its making, modular 6 oscillator design and its use in creating his experimental electronic music. ***Numerology of bees and beehive habitat patterns, hive logs and cycles are used as circuit starting points to make Music For Bees*** Followed by a short performance.

Bioni Samp is an artist, producer and video maker originally from Leeds, Yorkshire and currently resides in London. His electronic music has been published since 1995 and has had releases on various labels including, Aconito (UK/Italy), EMIT (UK) Harthouse (DE) Philtre/Kompakt, Instinct, Minimalizm (USA) and Noise Music (BR).

 

 

AriVibes is an iOS app designed to enable users to musically transform the sounds of physical objects. In other words, it is a portable, self-contained augmented reality system that allows a user to shape and control the perceived timbre of objects, to enable a wide range of users to use any object as a musical instrument.

The musical augmentation proposed is achieved by altering the timbre of an object with audio effects,  and offering real-time control over one or more augmentation parameters.

 

 

 

On Thursday, January 26th, I’d like to present the research and the design concepts behind its making.

 

And do a live demo with some beatboxing… See a teaser here:

• Checkout AriVibes on Facebook
• AriVibes’ sounds are on SoundCloud
• AriVibes’s official page

• I forgot to mention, I make music too!

Tonight we had our second songwriting challenge. Two teams of music hackers who’ve never worked together before. 90 mins to write a song….

Here’s what happened!

Team 1: Ariel, Bushra, Jean-Baptist > Lullaby

Songwriting 19 Jan 2012 by Music Hackspace

 

Team 2: Andrew, Paul, Ziad> hsjamery.mp3 <–download

Hsjamery – 90MIN SONGWRITING CHALLENGE 19/1/2012 team 2 by musichackspace

Enrico and David are classically trained composers. Enrico has been inspired by Xenakis and performs regularly compositions by Steve Reich. David studied composition at Cambridge and together they composed musical performances using electronic drum kits, MaxMSP, Ableton Live and an iPad.

We recorded three videos during their presentations.

In the first video, Enrico plays a piece using samples of guitar and drums.

In the second video, Enrico and David improvise with Enrico on the drums playing guitar and drum samples again, while David controls the chord progression of the sound samples:

 

In the third video, Enrico explains the process behind a piece they’ve composed together and a performance of the piece (to be posted soon)

Music hackers were invited to share and enjoy their Christmas presents and projects with the group.

Here are a selection:

Guy’s Tenori-on

Guy demoed his new Tenori-on. Ten minuts later the group were mesmerised in a bleepy blinky trance.

See the video for guys intro to the fantastic Tenori-on:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUTSw2utKgQ

Phil’s Wave Flavours

Phil showed off his Maximillian based composition, “Wave Flavours.”

Phil also demoed his iPhone synth. Check out the video for more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb0oWmafnDE

Ziad’s Tascam DR-004

Ziad presented his Tascam digital 4-track recorder. A great songwriters tool and field recording device. We’ll be seeing more of the DR-004 at the hackspace in the coming months.

Ziad and Martin also teamed up to combine Martin’s self-built BlipBox Midi controller with Ziad’s Ableton based sound design. Check out the video for a demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=md19UWFoGXI

Macro’s  Sony MDR-XB300 Headphones

Macro indulged in a “Bourgeois” Spotify Premium account and a new pair of earphones to enjoy it with. (seen here modelled by Guy)

Marco also presented his video editing/ encoding/streaming projects. Hopefully we’ll be live-streaming presentations using his technology in the near future…

Martin’s  New Studio

The largest part of the meeting was spent in Martin’s new studio. This space is full of traditional instruments and assorted electronics. Far too many to list here. Needless to say, much noise was made and fun was had.

Thanks Martin for having us, and congratulations on your great new studio!