As a part of Sound and Music’s Embedded Composer programme, Music Hackspace hosted sound artist Tim Murray-Browne during a ten month residency. The composer in residency programme resulted in The Cave of Sounds, an interactive sound installation exploring the prehistoric origins of collective music making through the contemporary music hacker scene.

The work was created by composer in residence Tim Murray-Browne in collaboration with members of the Music Hackspace (Dom Aversano, Susanna Garcia & Borja Alexandre, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas and Kacper Ziemianin) and debuted in London in August 2013.

In 2014, The Cave of Sounds was awarded the Sonic Arts Award (Digital Art category).

The final installation consists of a circular arrangement of eight bespoke digital musical instruments. Audience members are invited to experiment with the instruments together, explore the potential of creating music as a means to interact with new people and consider the intertwined history of music and technology.

Although music plays a greater role in our lives than ever before, creating music is an activity often limited to trained professionals. Made up of a set of newly conceived musical instruments, The Cave of Sounds seeks to disrupt the boundaries between performer and audience. Regardless of training, visitors are invited to actively participate and experiment with new ways of creating and connecting with each other through sound.

Each instrument has been designed and created over a period of eight months by a member of London’s Music Hackspace as a personal and interactive embodiment of the ideas and mind of its creator, whilst remaining intuitive to allow newcomers to express themselves.

In the hands of its audience, the work is crafted to provoke participants to connect and resonate with each other through musical expression. Software linking the instruments allows them to gently adjust their sounds to converge musically as well as detecting musical connections between participants and visualising them on a central floor projection of abstract shapes.

Events

• 90dB Festival Internazionale Arti Sonore, 11-14 September 2014. Exhibited at Ex-Cartiera Latina, the former Latina Paper Factory, as a part of the 90dB Festival of sonic arts.
• Watermans Gallery, 1-3 November 2013.  Performing for the Arts and Technology Festival near Richmond, London.
• The Victoria & Albert Museum, 21 September 2013. Exhibited for one day as a part of the V&A Digital Design Weekend and the London Design Week Festival.
• Barbican Centre, 19-26 August 2013. The Cave of Sounds debuted on Level -1 of the Barbican as a part of Hack the Barbican.

Tim Murray-Browne

Tim Murray-Browne is a sound artist and creative coder based in London. He works primarily with installation and performance pieces that investigate themes of discovery, self-expression and how they relate through action, movement and sound. Drawing on technology, dance and the psychology of human-computer interaction, he seeks to create interactive works that rely on minimal instruction, highlighting how physical and social interactions inform our understanding of who we are, our place within the environment and our relationships with each other.

Murray-Browne’s recent work includes IMPOSSIBLE ALONE, an immersive soundscape that can be explored only through the synchronised movement of two individuals, created with the dancer Tiff Chan, and the Serendiptichord, a wearable musical instrument for dancers created with the artist Di Mainstone. It has been shown around the world at venues including the Barbican, the V&A, Berkeley Art Museum, Kinetica Art Fair and the Secret Garden Party.

With the new Embedded residency with Sound and Music for Spring 2015 announced, we welcome you to meet our previous composer in residence Tim Murray-Browne.

When: Thursday 19th of February, 6.30pm

Where: Unit 15, 5-10 Corbridge Crescent London E2 9DS

Tim Murray-Browne will speak about his ten month residency at the Music Hackspace through Sound and Music’s Embedded Composer programme,. This composer in residency programme resulted in The Cave of Sounds, an interactive sound installation exploring the prehistoric origins of collective music making through the contemporary music hacker scene. 

 

The work was created by composer in residence Tim Murray-Browne in collaboration with members of the Music Hackspace (Dom Aversano, Susanna Garcia & Borja Alexandre, Wallace Hobbes, Daniel Lopez, Tadeo Sendon, Panagiotis Tigas and Kacper Ziemianin) and debuted in London in August 2013.

In 2014, The Cave of Sounds was awarded the Sonic Arts Award (Digital Art category).

The final installation consists of a circular arrangement of eight bespoke digital musical instruments. Audience members are invited to experiment with the instruments together, explore the potential of creating music as a means to interact with new people and consider the intertwined history of music and technology. Although music plays a greater role in our lives than ever before, creating music is an activity often limited to trained professionals. Made up of a set of newly conceived musical instruments, The Cave of Sounds seeks to disrupt the boundaries between performer and audience. Regardless of training, visitors are invited to actively participate and experiment with new ways of creating and connecting with each other through sound. Each instrument has been designed and created over a period of eight months by a member of London’s Music Hackspace as a personal and interactive embodiment of the ideas and mind of its creator, whilst remaining intuitive to allow newcomers to express themselves. In the hands of its audience, the work is crafted to provoke participants to connect and resonate with each other through musical expression. Software linking the instruments allows them to gently adjust their sounds to converge musically as well as detecting musical connections between participants and visualising them on a central floor projection of abstract shapes.

Events

• 90dB Festival Internazionale Arti Sonore, 11-14 September 2014. Exhibited at Ex-Cartiera Latina, the former Latina Paper Factory, as a part of the 90dB Festival of sonic arts.
• Watermans Gallery, 1-3 November 2013.  Performing for the Arts and Technology Festival near Richmond, London.
• The Victoria & Albert Museum, 21 September 2013. Exhibited for one day as a part of the V&A Digital Design Weekend and the London Design Week Festival.
• Barbican Centre, 19-26 August 2013. The Cave of Sounds debuted on Level -1 of the Barbican as a part of Hack the Barbican.

Tim Murray-Browne Tim Murray-Browne is a sound artist and creative coder based in London. He works primarily with installation and performance pieces that investigate themes of discovery, self-expression and how they relate through action, movement and sound. Drawing on technology, dance and the psychology of human-computer interaction, he seeks to create interactive works that rely on minimal instruction, highlighting how physical and social interactions inform our understanding of who we are, our place within the environment and our relationships with each other. Murray-Browne’s recent work includes IMPOSSIBLE ALONE, an immersive soundscape that can be explored only through the synchronised movement of two individuals, created with the dancer Tiff Chan, and the Serendiptichord, a wearable musical instrument for dancers created with the artist Di Mainstone. It has been shown around the world at venues including the Barbican, the V&A, Berkeley Art Museum, Kinetica Art Fair and the Secret Garden Party.

This Thursday’s event at the Music Hackspace will feature Andrew McPherson talking about the results of his EPSRC-funded project Hackable Instruments, summarising the results from both the study of appropriation and the D-Box study, along with a live demo of the D-Box and a discussion of future directions.

When: Thursday 12th February, 6.30pm
Where: Unit 15, 5–10 Corbridge Crescent London E2 9DS

The Hackable Instruments project (Victor Zappi and Andrew McPherson, Queen Mary University of London) looks at the ways performers use and misuse technology for creative ends. From the saxophone to the electric guitar to the turntable, musicians have been developing playing techniques for instruments which the designer did not expect. Customisation and modification are also important forces in the adoption of new instruments, with circuit bending being a prominent example in electronic music performance.

The Hackable Instruments project began with the creation of a deliberately constrained instrument to study the phenomenon of appropriation, where a performer develops a personal working relationship with an instrument. One finding of this study was that adding degrees of freedom to an instrument does not necessarily produce richer interactions or more favourable responses from performers.

More recently, the Hackable Instruments team developed the D-Box, an instrument which is designed for modification and circuit bending by the performer. The D-Box is a 15cm battery-powered cube incorporating touch sensors and a BeagleBone Black single-board computer. Inside the box is a breadboard of circuits which can be rewired in arbitrary ways to create new patterns of behaviour. The D-Box was used in an October 2014 performance by 10 musicians, many from London Music Hackspace.

Hackable Instruments was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, EP/K032046/1, 2013-14.

This will be our first AGM at the space, and an opportunity to review how we’re doing and take actions for the activities for the rest of the year.

The Music Hackspace Annual General Meeting will take place on Thursday 12th Mar 2015 18:30 – 20:00, at Music Hackspace Unit 15, 5–10 Corbridge Crescent London E2 9DS.

AGM agenda:

– Review of mission and objectives
– Accounts and legal structure report
– Seminar program report
– Workshops programme report
– Space and permanence coordination
– Website maintenance
– Housekeeping
– Event catering
– Advisory board
– Any other business

For this week’s presentation, Gawain Hewitt from Drake Music will host a session introducing the work being done by their Research and Development department to encourage and support the development of new Accessible Musical Technology (AMT). The presentation will take place at our new space (Unit 15, 5–10 Corbridge Crescent, London E2 9DS) this Thursday 5th of February from 7.30pm.

“The social model of disability says that disability is caused by the way society is organised, rather than by a person’s impairment or difference. It looks at ways of removing barriers that restrict life choices for disabled people. When barriers are removed, disabled people can be independent and equal in society, with choice and control over their own lives.” Scope  – they have a great film on the subject here http://bit.ly/1z6jAx3

“At Drake Music we believe that technology can remove the barriers that many disabled people face when making music, and that good design, and innovative approaches will lead to new instruments and musical experiences. We have been working with the hacking, coding and making community for 3 years now as we seek to further this work. This meeting is an opportunity to meet us, learn about are work and get involved. We have a monthly meeting at our office, and also arrange hack events. We are also Mi.Mu gloves collaborators, and you can read about our work with Mi.Mu and Kris Halpin here http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/25/imogen-gloves-weekend” Drake Music.

How to find us?
The closest tube stations are Cambridge Heath Road station (5 minutes walk), Bethnal Green (Central Line – 10 minutes away) and Hoxton station (Overground – around 15 minutes).

We look forward to seeing you!

Following the inauguration of our new space and the successful fundraiser campaign, we are excited to host our first presentation and discussion open session, with Dom Aversano on Thursday 29th January from 6.30pm at our new space (Unit 15, 5–10 Corbridge Crescent, London E2 9DS).

Dom Aversano is a percussionist, composer, and writer who has studied music from various global cultures; as he prepares to write a book, he will present the case that the Western music tradition has a long-standing cultural bias for harmony, which has led to the neglect of rhythm and a delimited understanding of music.

Aversano is seeking to collaborate with open-source programmers and visual designers in the MHS community, to explore new ways of representing music both visually and in sound.

How to find us? 

The closest tube stations are Cambridge Heath Road station (5 minutes walk), Bethnal Green (Central Line – 10 minutes away) and Hoxton station (Overground – around 15 minutes).

We look forward to seeing you at our new space!

Andrew Ostler of Expert Sleepers Ltd will present the ‘disting’, a hackable Eurorack format synthesiser module, this Thursday 9th of October at 7pm, at Troyganic Cafe (132 Kingsland Road, E2 8DP).

The disting is based around a commodity PIC32 microcontroller and an audio codec, providing the ability to run surprisingly complex processes on control voltages and audio at high audio sample rates. As shipped the module provides 16 algorithms (selected from a front panel knob), but the microcontroller can be flashed with user code. Expert Sleepers have provided an open source code framework to facilitate this.

Andrew will present an overview of the hardware and software design, and demonstrate the code framework. Attendees are invited to bring along their favourite algorithm for a little live coding demo!

 

We are excited to welcome Metal artist-in-residence Jack James who will be hosting with us an informal ‘sharing event’ of his new piece Temporary Local Broadcast.

When: Thursday 18th September 7pm

Where: Troyganic Cafe, 132 Kingsland Road, corner of Cremer Street, London E2 8DY

Entrance: Free!

This is an opportunity to hear some of the recordings that Jack has made for the project, all of which have been produced in Peterborough, along with a presentation and discussion.

Temporary Local Broadcast began with a series of recorded conversations in July and August 2014 exploring Peterborough’s multicultural community. Jack James, Metal’s artist-in-residence, walked around the diverse Lincoln Road in Peterborough with his audio recorder and registered distinct talks with the city residents.
By the 20th of August the first sharing event took place at one of the most visited places by the artist – Sado Café – a little Portuguese coffee in the middle of Lincoln Road, where Jack shared some of the stories and recordings done so far.

On the 31st of August a hyper-local FM radio transmission happened where Jack invited the listeners to take part on a shared tuning in event with their own radios or car systems at Chaffeurs Cottage, where Metal is based in Peterborough. In this broadcast he presented a piece made through the conversations recorded in the project. A simultaneous broadcast occurred from Resonance104.4FM and Peterborough FM.

An FM radio installation broadcasting excerpts from conversations recorded as part of Temporary Local Broadcast is at Chaffeurs Cottage until the 3rd of October. An online version of this installation and a project archive is available at www.temporarylocalbroadcast.co.uk

Temporary Local Broadcast has been commissioned by Metal and is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Join us tomorrow Wednesday 3rd from 7pm at Troganic Cafe. In the meeting we will go through the final preparations for our participation in the TedXTeen conference, which will take place in London on October 11th 2014.

When: Wednesday 3rd September, 7pm
Where: 132 Kingsland Road, Corner of Cremer Street, London E2 8DY

Come around if you would like to volunteer to support and join us in the event!

The TEDx Program is a platform created by TED and TEDxTeen is an all day conference put on by We Are Family Foundation, taking place in New York City. This October they are bringing the 6th TEDxTeen Conference to London at the O2 Indigo Theatre.