Thursday 21th of March 2013
7.00 pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London

As part of the lineup we have the famous Hackspace Big Band. If you would like to play with the big bad band on the night, or want to hang out and get a preview of what’s to come, join us at Troyganic this Thursday at 7pm for a rehearsal (read: jam!).

Details of the Hackship event are available on the Hackship webpage. We also have a Facebook event page, and tickets are available here!

Thursday 14th of March 2013
7.00 pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London

This Thursday we welcome artists Riz Maslen and Alo Allik.

Riz Maslen (http://neotropic.net/) is an electronic innovator and multi-instrumentalist.
British producer, singer and multi-instrumentalist Riz Maslen, who records as Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine has been described as one of the most prominent women composers working in post-techno experimental electronics. In addition to her warm electronic programming, Maslen’s music also embraces folk, psychedelic pop and her interest in experimental film-making.

The media has warmly received her albums on Ninja Tune, Oxygen Music Works, Mush Recordings, R&S and Squids Eye. She’s performed globally over the past decade at events including LA’s Coachella concert series and Montreaux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

Neotropic’s live shows have always focused on creating a cinematic journey for the audience with the inclusion of her dark photographic and film imagery.

Alo Allik: Live coding evolution by artificial selection

Alo Allik (http://tehis.net) is an artist and a programmer with an aesthetically and geographically restless lifestyle, which has enabled him to traverse a diverse range of musical worlds including DJ-ing electronic dance music, live electronic jam sessions, electroacoustic composition, free improvisation and audiovisual performances. His interests include how to model natural processes by programming and use these models in live performance. In this presentation, he will first investigate an evolutionary programming approach to sound synthesis and then attempt to use this system in a live-coded audiovisual performance.

Since the first ingenious artificial life experiments in the 1950ies, evolutionary computing has inspired numerous problem solving and model building techniques including ways to evolve sound synthesis algorithms inspired by processes of evolution by adaptation and natural selection. In our attempts to understand these natural algorithmic processes, which are purposeless and devoid of any intention, but nonetheless directly responsible for all the complexity and intelligent behaviour in the natural world, we keep developing increasingly more powerful technology that enables us to model and simulate, albeit on a vastly simplified scale, the power of cumulative selection.

Alo Allik will explore this idea through a relatively novel concept of gene expression programming, a method of evolutionary computation that provides an alternative to the established paradigms of classic genetic algorithms and genetic programming, and apply it to sound synthesis in the SuperCollider programming environment. He’s hoping to reveal creative applications of evolutionary computation which do not necessarily presume a definite solution to a problem, but rather an open-ended option space to be explored for aesthetic experimentation.

Please note, this event will happen exceptionally on Friday 4th of January 2013, instead of the usual gathering on Thursday.

A night of sonic, visual acts and improvisation. The first event of 2013 includes performances by:

Tamer Karaman
Dor Wand
raxil4
David Agudelo Bernal
Cassiel
Lady Hackspace
Leafcutter John
Left hands cut off the Right
Dr. Benway

Visuals by whiteemotion

Entrance: suggested donation £5

Available Limited screenprinted Music Hackspace T-shirts by Blanca Regina

Thursday 7th of March, 7pm
Troyganic, 138 Kingsland Road, London

The Music Hackspace is proud to invite the Centrifuge and Supernatant Laboratories, for a seminar with two guest speakers, Robert Tubb aka Cursor Miner (Queen Mary, University of London) and Gordon Charlton (aka Beat Frequency) to talk about mathematical approaches to rhythm sequencing and advanced theremin techniques.

Robert Tubb / Cursor Miner (Queen Mary, University of London)
Mathematically Inspired Approaches To Live Rhythm Sequencing

Robert Tubb is a London-based musician and programmer best known as his artist alias “Cursor Miner”, and currently researching towards a Doctorate in DSP at Queen Mary, University of London..
The bulk of midi style sequencing is carried out in a piano-roll type representation. This descends from traditional score which has evolved to suit western classical music. However for modern electronic genres such as dance music, driven by repetitive rhythms, this layout is rather unwieldy. In the case of live improvisatory performance, a piano-roll is pretty much impossible to manage.
This session will explore that the way we approach rhythm sequencing is lacking. We hear audio in the frequency domain, we play musical instruments in the frequency domain (i.e. the notes in a scale are frequencies). Rhythm is an equally cyclical, harmonic phenomenon so why then should we be specifying everything as points in time? The central idea here is that all aspects of music are driven by repetitions in time, not singular points in time. A linear-time based approach: where every note in the piano roll has to be specified by hand, is inferior to the circular-time (aka frequency) based approach, where patterns are constructed by overlaying simple “basis functions” that “add up” in some way to produce satisfying structure.
A new type of sequencer will be presented that ties all these ideas together and uses the concept of a Fourier Transform (which views patterns as the sum of pure sine wave oscillations) to generate meaningful patterns and, perhaps more importantly, transitions between these patterns.
http://www.rootnot.co.uk/

Gordon Charlton / Beat Frequency (Supernatant)
Exotic Theremin Techniques

Gordon is an unrepentant theremin enthusiast, the brains behind the successful Hands Off series of theremin events, which ranges from the world’s largest gathering of thereminists to landmark performances at the Royal Festival Hall as part of the Southbank Centre’s annual Ether festival.
Gordon records and performs under the nom de guerre Beat Frequency as, he explains, “The theremin is more than an electronic instrument, it is a cybernetic instrument both in the science fiction cyborg sense, and also the technical Norbert Wiener sense; the player being, electronically speaking, part of the instrument, and, lacking any tangible reference points, utterly dependant on an audio feedback loop. The beat frequency is at the heart of the theremin. My aim is to rediscover the theremin as an instrument of the third millennium, informed by the physics of the instrument and based on a fundamental understanding of psycho-acoustics rather than applying it to common practice music, which makes as much sense as a didgeridoo in a classical orchestra.”
His visceral sonic excursions are reminiscent of the early days of Industrial Music, and his fluid, evolving soundscapes have been likened to the music of Raymond Scott, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Gyorgy Ligeti, Nurse With Wound and Throbbing Gristle. The third Beat Frequency album, The Invisible Horn, was released recently by White Label Music.
Gordon’s sessions will include a demonstration and discussion of the “Beat Frequency” method and the use of effects to process theremin audio as well as an opportunity to have “hands off” experience of playing a theremin.
http://beat-frequency.blogspot.co.uk/

Music Hackspace and SoundFjord are delighted to present:

Miha Ciglar . Adam Parkinson . Koray Tahiroglu
14 February 2013 | 8pm | Troyganic Café, 132 Kinsland Road, LONDON, E2 8DY

Last minute info: Atau Tanaka will not be performing due to unforeseen circumstances.

£7/5 conc and members
Tickets: www.wegottickets.com/event/208098
Info: www.soundfjord.org

Miha Ciglar will perform an improvised set based on “no input mixing board” feedback concepts, involving the “Syntact” new musical interface, which he developed within IRZU – Institute for Sonic Arts Research and its spin-off company Ultrasonic Audio Technologies. The revolutionary technology behind Syntact provides contact-free tactile feedback to the musician. By utilising airborne ultrasound a force field is created in mid-air that can be sensed in a tactile way. It allows a musician to feel the actual sound with its temporal and harmonic texture. While an optical sensor system is interpreting his hand gestures and mapping the descriptors of hand motion onto sound synthesis/processing parameters, the musician can physically engage with the medium of sound by virtually molding and shaping it – i.e. changing its acoustic appearance – directly with his hands.

Adam Parkinson and Atau Tanaka have been playing as an iPhone duo since 2010, implementing a granular synthesiser and beat slicers in PureData to run in a RJDJ environment. After performing a concert set of samples from natural sounds, and cheesy ambiances, to disco as source material for time-stretching and freezing in places such as the Mois Multi Quebec, NY Electronic Music Festival, Charmed Sound Helsinki and Electron Festival Geneva, they turned their attention to live sampling and contortion of everyday objects. Following a recent focused, poetic performance at Audio Art festival in Krakow, Parkinson and Tanaka will use their experience to perform utilising smartphone devises as a microphone, recorder, stretcher, and mangler, using the built in sensors on the devices not so much to pick up gesture, but to highlight the difficulty of standing still.

Koray Tahiroglu will perform InHands, a free improv, real-time improvisation for live electronics and gesture controlled instruments, interfaced with torch and mobile phones. Interactive performance system acts together with the performer’s control gestures and responds to the current state changes of the system components. This piece explores noise as a musical element carrying information for the aesthetics of the music. Hannah Drayson created the abstract visual-layers of this piece.

[Biographies are below]

Biographies:

Miha Ciglar is a composer and researcher in the field of audio technologies. He holds a MSc degree from the Academy of Music and the University of Technology in Graz, Austria. In 2008, Ciglar founded the Institute for Sonic Arts Research – IRZU. He is the initiator and curator of the international sonic arts festival EarZoom, which takes place annually, since 2009 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. In 2011 he founded Ultrasonic audio technologies – a start-up company, developing a wide range of products including new musical interface controllers based on non-contact tactile feedback and computer vision, directional speakers based on modulated ultrasound, as well as several mobile applications combining music making and gaming. Ciglar was the conference chair of the 2012 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), which was held in September 2012 at IRZU in Ljubljana, Slovenia. www.ultrasonic-audio.com | www.ciglar.mur.at | www.irzu.org | www.icmc2012.si

Adam Parkinson has worked alongside artists such as Rhodri Davies, Klaus Filip, Robin Hayward, Dominic Lash, and Kaffe Matthews. He has releases on Entrʼacte, Unique 3ʼs Mutate Records, Si Beggʼs Noodles and 16k records. He also dabbles in making dance music, and under various guises has remixed Maximo Park, Dextro and others. www.adamparkinson.co.uk

Atau Tanaka’s first influences came from meeting John Cage and would go on to recreate Cage’s Variations VII with Zoviet France. He formed Sensorband with Zbigniew Karkowski and Edwin van der Heide, and S.S.S with Cecile Babiole and Laurent Dailleau. He has releases on labels such as Sub Rosa, Bip-hop, Touch/Ash, Sonoris. He is currently leading a new research group for the MetaGestureMusic at Goldsmiths. www.ataut.net

Koray Tahiroglu practices art as a researcher, as well as a performer of interactive music. His work focuses on embodied approaches to sonic interaction in participative music experience. Since 2004, he has been also teaching workshops and courses introducing artistic strategies and methodologies for creating computational art works. Tahirog ̆lu has performed experimental music in collaboration as well as in solo performances in Europe and North America. www.mlab.taik.fi/~korayt

THIS EVENT TAKES PLACE AT ROLI, 2 GLEBE ROAD, E8 4BD

Registration only

Thursday 7th of February 2013, 7pm-9pm

Thursday 31st of January 2013, 7:30pm
Troyganic, 138 Kingsland Road, E2 8DY, London

After a long xmas break the London Max/MSP User’s Group begins its 2013 monthly max meetups with a presentation by musician and artist Leafcutter John. He’ll be showing us his light controlled music hardware which uses sensors, Arduino and of course Max. Come along and join in the discussion.

Also if anyone wants to talk about a project they are involved in or need help with a patch or an object – this is the place to come to every last Thursday of the month.

There’s a couple of videos of the work on Leafcutter John’s blog here http://leafcutterjohn.com/?cat=7
and here’s an interview by cycling74 from a few years back http://cycling74.com/2007/07/06/interview-with-leafcutter-john-musician/

London Max/MSP Users Group on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/155069101204145/

Thursday 24th of January 2013
7pm (7:30pm start)
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London

Music technology has the capacity to break down disabling barriers to music making. Gawain Hewitt, R&D National Manager for Drake Music will introduce some of the concepts, politics and existing technology being used in schools for the disabled and other settings. He will also introduce a hackday proposed for March with Furtherfield and David Stevens of Music For Special Needs will present technology systems he has developed himself that are used in schools across the country to help children with Special Needs make music.
All systems will be available to demo, and this is the first of many call outs for more input in developing tools for this sector.

Thursday 17th of January 2013, 7:30pm
Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DY

The Hacked Human Orchestra is a project by MzTEK, Guerilla Science and Kobakant to produce a series of wearable musical designs for workshops, culminating in a audio mix of the Hacked Human Orchestra. Last December we welcomed MzTek for one of their  Hacked Human Orchestra workshops at the Music Hackspace.

Sophie McDonald is a co-founder of MzTEK, she is a media artist, freelance workshop producer, video editor, and educator. Her work includes the online programming platform sketchPatch.

MzTEK provides short courses, workshops, geek-outs and events. Their classes focus on technical training in an arts context, ranging from basic electronics and circuitry to more advanced courses in programming and prototyping. MzTEK is a non-profit organisation based in London with the aim of addressing the imbalance of women artists working in the fields of new media, computer arts, and technology. Among their exciting projects, they’ve recently been invited to manage The Open Data Institute’s data-as-culture art commissions for their launch.

 

FIRST ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Music Hackspace
20th of January 2013
15:00, Troyganic, 132 Kingsland Road, London

Meeting Agenda

1. Introduction

Welcome
Present and apologies

2. Vision and objectives

Music Hackspace vision and objectives
Accounts (Jean-Baptiste Thiebaut)

3. Report of activities (short reviews)

Seminars
Concerts
Workshops
Composer in residency
Sound Art installations
MaxMSP meet ups
Collaborations
Others

4. Status of the organisation

Membership
Hackspace affiliation
Roles and responsibilities
Elections planning

5. Events strategy and planning

Frequency of events
Organisation and tasks sharing
Location
Collaborations

6. Online activities

Roles and responsibilities for the website, Facebook and Twitter
Online shop

7. Conclusion

Final announcements
Further meetings to organise group activities