Chris Weaver and Ed Baxter from Resonance 104.4 Fm and Resonance Radio Orchestra will talk about the work ‘Speed of Light’ which was commissioned as part of Legacy Trust UK’s Community Celebrations programme, which aimed to build a lasting legacy from the UK’s hosting of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

In August 2012 Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat was the stage for an extraordinary public art performance. The iconic mountain was brought to life in a mass choreographed act of walking and endurance running as part of Edinburgh International Festival and London 2012 Festival. Nightly audiences walked to the summit carrying energy-harvesting light staffs, and become part of the work. A mesmerising set of patterns unfolded below as hundreds of sequenced runners activated the path networks in remotely-controlled light suits. Each performance was an interaction between movement, light, sound and landscape, offering a rare perspective onto the city and night skies beyond.

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

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.

On Sunday 21st April  Drake Music will run a hackday to create and share new instruments that break down disabling barriers to music making. Run in partnership with Furtherfield and Music Hackspace, makers will have the opportunity to work towards one of two prizes for the most innovative work.

Software as well as hardware hackers are welcome.

There will be some devices to hack if you don’t bring your own (makey makey, arduino…), a £100 price to the best project – and pizza!

More info:

http://wiki.london.hackspace.org.uk/view/Assistive_Music_Technology

http://drakemusicresearch.wordpress.com/

To register or to ask any questions please email gawainhewitt@drakemusic.org or twitter @DrakeMusicRandD

There’s a limited number of spaces available so email Gawain if you want to join!

Since 2001, Holzkopf has been gaining a reputation for unique, abstract and euphorically abrasive performances. Borrowing from dub mixing, noise performance, psychedelia and free improvisation, Holzkopf seeks to keep the style and sound undefinable and non-linear. Through grass roots touring networks, Holzkopf has played dance parties under bridges and in clubs, free style noise sculpture in parks and deep listening sessions in small apartments. Sounds are made through glitching cassette players, tweaking old samplers and messing with bargain bin drum machines, Performances are never repeated. As a very active performer and producer, Holzkopf’s work can be found on near 100 releases from labels in Canada, the USA, Europe and Japan.

Website: holzkopf666.googlepages.com

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!