When: Thursday 27th of February 2014, 7pm
Where: Troyganic Café, 132 Kingsland Road, London

Who:
Aimée Lê is a poet and artist of Vietnamese and American descent. She is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, in their practice-based programme.

What:
Aimée has been working on several different strands of music & performance. She was involved in hip-hop workshops in Chicago & produced her own songs using loops and diegetic sounds. She also co-leads an experimental songwriting workshop. Most of Aimée’s poetry involves live performance and vernacular language. Her current poetry project uses tape recordings to document family narratives from the Vietnam War. However, the technology she has used so far has been very bootleg (electric banjo made of coffee cans, recordings on her cell phone, etc.), and she is hoping to branch into engineering, building & programming sound equipment herself. All kinds of D-I-Y advice welcome!

When: Thursday 20th February 2014, 7:00pm
Where: Troyganic 132 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DY

About Jean-Philippe
Jean-Philippe Rio-Py is known as a fantastic pianist, chosen at a young age to be a featured Steinway artist. He has performed at the Royal Opera House and opened the first night re-launch for the prestigious Arts Club in Mayfair. Jean-Philippe has composed music for labels such as Air-Edel, EMI and Warner, while some of his other works have recently been broadcasted worldwide, and featured in ad campaigns by Hulu, Samsung, Mercedes and many more.

The Project M
As a composer for films and production music, Jean-Philippe encounters the limitations of software instruments to reproduce the sounds of acoustic instruments, in particular string instruments. How to reproduce a string sound without hiring a violinist and going to the studio? Despite the great progress in digital audio to replicate acoustic sounds, it is still possible for a trained ear to distinguish a digitally created string instrument from a recording of the real instrument.

Jean-Philippe is in the early stages of addressing this problem, not by creating another software, but by creating a hardware to perform and amplify string sounds. Using real strings, a robotised bow and plectra, Project M will receive MIDI instructions to mechanically play string sounds, allowing for exact reproduction of acoustic recordings of strings.
Jean-Philippe has the passion and drive to take this project forward and he’s going to present his project to the Music Hackspace community, to receive feedback and create connections to build this ambitious music box.

On Thursday 12th of September, we will receive the founders of two recent successful Kickstarter projects (TouchKeys and The OWL), and discuss the next phases in their project. They will share their experience at starting the project, what it’s been like during the fund raising campaign, and finally, what’s next, now that they have the money. It is an opportunity for these two projects to find support and resources among the audience, and for the audience to get insight into community entrepreneurship.

As usual, our events are free to attend and open to everyone.

As the Music Hackspace returns to its welcoming Troyganic Café in East London after a month at the Barbican, it will also be an opportunity for multiple performances following the Kickstarter seminar.

WHERE: Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London (near Hoxton station)
WHEN: Thursday 12th of September, 19:30 (seminar), 21:30 (performances)

SEMINAR SPEAKERS
Andrew McPherson, who recently successfully reached his goal to fund the production of TouchKeys. Andrew raised £46k out of his £30k target. You can find the project here on Kickstarter).

Guillaume Le Nost, part of The OWL team that smashed their target of £7k with an impressive £33k funding in late July 2013. You can find the OWL project here on Kickstarter.

PERFORMANCES
From 21.30 till 00:00

21.30 Bas Vellekoop http://www.basvellekoop.com/

22.05 diarmo Live Set. www.diarmo.co.uk

22.40 Tom Webster https://soundcloud.com/tamagazzi

23.05 Doctor Benway and Lady Hackspace A/V set

and on visuals a set each
Joe Catchpole
Blanca Regina

In the interludes raxil4
with intermission machines

For the Hackthebarbican, the Material Studies group (Blanca Regina, Matthias Kispert and Andrew Riley) will conduct and play in a session/workshop of 3 hours divided in 2 explorations at the Hammerson room and at the Lake Patio, from 15:00 until 18:00. For this session we will use multiple materials as cardboard , paper, wood and plastic. Audience can became a participant in any moment. Join us and explore the sound of the materials in a playfull experience!

The Material Studies Group was formed in 2012 by Blanca
Regina, Matthias Kispert, Andrew Riley and has since created a number of workshops focused on playful collective explorations of the sounds within matter. So far, workshops have been held at Sound//Space at V22 Summer Club, at SoundFjord Gallery and Cafe Oto, with guest participants including Steve Beresford,Iris Garrelfs and Ryan Jordan among others.

Avant-garde art, be it musically, visually or performance based often appears as somewhat elitist, with a
defined hierarchy between those who create the work (the artists) and those experience it (the audience). To
people who have not had the fortune of being taught all the codes of the artform, the pieces and the settings
in which these are shown can be uncomfortable and alienating.

The Material Studies project seeks to open these experimental artforms to anyone who wishes to participate in the collective, improvised sonic exploration of various materials and objects, whether by actively working with the objects, passively absorbing the interactions of others or by expressing a response to the sonic exploration through visual or written acts.

The use of traditional instruments, terminology and tools of manipulation are avoided. Participants together develop an improvisational language based solely on the sounds that can be teased out of various everyday objects, with each session being themed around a particular material or object.

No expertise or previous experience is required, instead the sessions focus on the communicative potential of collective improvisation, where every participant needs to listen and react to everything that is happening around, where every gesture has an influence on everything else.

The underlying principle of the project is to promote a corrosion of the space between the artist-performer
and the contemplator-audience and to promote the idea that we are all valuable as artists regardless of
education or class.

Materials used to date have included wood, plastic, metal, ceramics, paper and cardboard.

More information http://www.soundfjord.org/materialstudies.htm

To celebrate 2 years of community building, this event will showcase 2 projects supported by members of the Music Hackspace, and discuss the emergence of entrepreneurship within hackerspace communities.

WHERE: Barbican Free Stage, Penthouse 4C
Ground level by the lake side
Nearest Tube: Moorgate
Entrance by Silk Street

WHEN: Thursday 29th of August, 7:00pm

PROGRAM: The OWL, TouchKeys and a Panel

The OWL: a programmable guitar pedal. This project led by Martin Klang has raised over 400% of its target on Kickstarter and is now in production. Martin had previously released limited editions of modular synthesisers. The OWL allows to program and load your own effects onto a guitar pedal. Martin will present the OWL, the process that led to its Kickstarter campaign and the next steps of the project.

TouchKeys: This project led by Andrew McPherson is currently live on Kickstarter and to this day has reached 97% of its £30k target. The TouchKeys are a DIY sensor kit for adding multi-touch sensing to any piano keyboard. Andrew will demonstrate the TouchKeys and retrace 4 years of academic research leading to his Kickstarter campaign, and the next steps of the project.

PANEL
Martin Klang and Andrew McPherson will be joined by Charles Armstrong, founder of the Trampery and producer of Hack The Barbican, for a session on hacking, entrepreneurship and communities, moderated by Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, co-founder of the Music Hackspace.

The Music Hackspace Performances@HacktheBarbican is an event curated by Blanca Regina, on the 15th of August from 19:00 till 23:00pm -Club Stage, Barbican Centre- Free entrance.

On this occasion, 6 acts by various artists showcase and perform audiovisual pieces that illustrate the diversity of practices and aesthetics of the Music Hackspace.

The event will be presented by Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut, who co-founded Music Hackspace in 2011.

Artists include in order of live acts for the event:

ʻLive voice ʼ by Iris Garrelfs
Iris Garrelfs is a sound artist and composer “generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magazine put it. Tonight she presents a solo processed voice improvisation.
.

Blanca Regina & Leafcutter John Improvisation with special guest Steve Beresford

The duo of Blanca Regina and Leafcutter John engages improvisation, technology and live sound and video.Voices, glitches, objects and visuals are the main elements for this playful audio-visual performance.Throughout this year they’ve performed at Music Hackspace several times, developing a multi sensorial improvisation that follows the path of the unexpected, melting their identities with animalistic and other-world creatures.

“Sawbones 13.2” by raxil4, King Sara and P23
raxil4 is the alias of Andrew Page. His dark brooding dronescapes combine analogue and digital sound sources using a variety of equipment. His main instrument for this event will be his handmade sculptural guitar-like device made from driftwood and bones reclaimed from the River Thames. raxil4 will be accompanied by King Sara on musical saw and P23 on percussion.

Sharon Gal “solo performace”
Sharon Gal is a cross-disciplinary artist, performer and experimental musician. Her practice involves vocal and electronics, free improvisation, collaborative group & site specific performances, field recordings and radio broadcasts. Sharon Gal proposes a performance where she will be doing a set for voice and electronics.

cassiel “solo performance”
Nick Rothwell [aka cassiel] improvises with monomes and code with Gemma Riggs visual artist.

Darkroom “solo performance”
Andrew Ostler of Darkroom will give a solo performance combining analogue modular synthesis, digital control and processing, and a traditional acoustic instrument (in the form of bass clarinet). The ethos of Andrew’s work is that all sound sources are live and un-sampled, to allow freedom of creation in the moment. Depending on mood, this can range from exultant soundscapes to pounding noise.

TIMING& LINE UP

19:00 -19:05 Introduction
19:05 -19:25 Iris Garrelfs
19:30- 20:05 Leafcutter John and Blanca Regina

20:05-20:25 BREAK

20:25-20:30 Introduction
20:30-20:50 “Sawbones 13.2” by raxil4, King Sara and P23
20:55-21:35 Sharon Gal

21:35-21:55 BREAK

21:55-22:00 Introduction
22:00- 22: 20 cassiel
22:25- 23: 00 Darkroom

END

A team of Hackspace and Music Hackspace members are currently working on a programmable guitar effects pedal called the OWL. OWL stands for Open Ware Laboratory, which refers to the fact that the entire project is open-source in both hardware and software – all code and documents relating to the project will be freely available under the Gnu GPL license.

The OWL is based around an ARM Cortex M4 chip, and can be programmed using a specially developed software framework. The audio processing code takes the form of patches, which are written in C/C++ using a simple API. There is also a project called OwlSim which allows you to run the same patches as VST and Audio Unit plugins. This means that you can test your code in your favourite DAW/host before uploading to the pedal, or just have some fun building plugins with an easy-to-use C/C++ framework. A bunch of patches have already been written and are ready to be tried out.

The team ran a Kickstarter campaign last month to raise funding for a first production run of the pedal and raised more than £33,000 (over 400% funded of the initial £8000 target) in pre-orders. They found it hugely encouraging to see that there are a lot of people out there who are enthused by open-source programmable hardware. Currently the design is being finalised, with production scheduled to start in August.

For more information, check out the project website at http://hoxtonowl.com/, and if you are interested in getting involved in some capacity (this could be web management, PR, patch development, coding or hardware assembly) they would like to hear from you – send them an email at hoxtonowl@gmail.com.

Thursday 2nd of May 2013
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road
7pm

Summary
A detailed look at the musically interactive Coca-Cola Beatbox Pavilion at the London 2012 Olympic Park, with live demo.
I will give a practical look at the interactive and generative music techniques I developed for the project, talking about working with projected capacitance sensors, showing the custom hardware that was developed by iArt interactive for the building and giving an overview of the computer system that ran the building.
I will also talk about the logistics of the project; working with a big corporate, architects, designers, engineers and marketing departments to get a huge interactive music installation built on the Olympic Park in under 6 months.

Arthur is an interactive artist, sound designer and software developer, who graduated from the now defunct (we’ve heard) Music Informatics course at Sussex.

Website: http://www.arthurcarabott.com/

Coca-Cola Beatbox Pavillon – Olympic Games London 2012 from iart on Vimeo.

Thursday 18th of April 2013
7pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London

New digital media is very much about dynamic forms. We are familiar
with video graphics in games, and the process by which worlds and characters
are conceived and created. But what about dynamic
sounding objects and music? In this talk Andy focuses on the research and
development process behind computational sound. How are sounds analysed,
modelled and recreated in a runtime environment? What are the implications
for games, computer animated film and mobile interactive media? A slide
show and audio demonstration will be followed by Q&A session.

Biography:

Andy Farnell is a computer scientist from the UK with specialisations in signal
processing, modelling and synthesis. Pioneer of procedural audio and the author
of MIT textbook “Designing Sound”, Andy is visiting professor at several European
institutions and consultant to interactive media
companies. He is also an enthusiastic advocate and hacker of Free open source software,
who believes in educational opportunities and access to enabling tools and knowledge for all.

We are  pleased to announce some awesome additions to our already bursting Music Hackship event:

 

Alo Allik is confirmed to play on the main stage!

Allik has a musically and geographically restless lifestyle which has taken him through diverse creative environments half way around the northern hemisphere, including eclectic DJ sets, live electronic jams, electroacoustic composition, free improv and multimedia performances all over the US and Europe. He has been hooked on SuperCollider for over 10 years and is currently based in the UK.

tehis.net

Jag Bot is presenting his latest work on his amazing DIN project, a bezier curve sound synthesiser:

After 6 years of continuous development on GNU/Linux, DIN Is Noise makes its debut on the Mac OS X on April 1, 2013 🙂  DIN is a software musical instrument that uses Bezier curves for almost all aspects of sound production – waveforms, beats, modulation & FX. DIN is fully microtonal with notes as mere favourites.  Users can play DIN with their mouse like a traditional bowed instrument or create masses of drones on any microtone, edit their timbre and visually modulate them all in realtime.  DIN supports OSC and MIDI for input.  Jag will talk about demons slayed (both philosophical and technical) in bringing DIN to Mac OS X, why DIN will be Free software on GNU/Linux, and how to harness social media for marketing independent software.  Attendees with Macs can leave the room with a free beta release of DIN!

 

 

 

 

Additionally we will have an exciting site specific sound installation by Kacper Ziemianin, MS Soundbnitz:

Kacper uses microphones that allow us to listen to sounds that are not normally perceptible to human ears (hydrophones for underwater sounds, contact microphones for sounds of solid objects, telephone pick up coils for sounds of electromagnetic fields). Interesting sounds are amplified, and the audience is encouraged to interact and ‘play’ MS Stubnitz.

 

Tickets are available now, at an early-bird price of only £10 for the whole day; £8 for hackspace members, students and OAPs!

There are also spaces still left for the two workshops, but please book early to avoid disappointment!