Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the prestigious IRCAM, a Music & Technology institution in Paris. If you’ve unfamiliar with IRCAM it’s worth doing a little digging, they’re the place where Max was first created, a music/sound programming environment that’s become the standard in visual programming environments for realtime sound installations and too many music projects to name. I spoke about creating new instruments, the challenges of creating a Rapid prototyping workshop for instruments and why I chose to make the workshop…Continue Reading “Workshop Talk at IRCAM”
A question that keeps running through my mind is what is the proper context for a Workshop on Creating Musical Instruments with new technology? Most might answer with a music school or university and others might say a place where people study electronics and engineering, but personally, coming from a UX and Interaction Design background equips me with just the right blend of strategizing, making, testing skills to create instruments. That’s exactly why I decided to facilitate my workshop at the Midwest UX in Chicago…Continue Reading “Workshop in Chicago at MWUX”
One Day Workshop (more detail)
How various applications are connected in the Sonic Interactions Kit
To streamline the Sonic Interactions workshops we’ve created an open source audio toolkit which we’re calling the Sonic Interactions Kit (SIK). It was important to create an accessible open source audio kit for the workshops. Hardware SIK consists of the following hardware components: Raspberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org) – Linux Microprocessor Lots of Pots expansion board (https://moderndevice.com/product/lots-of-pots-lop-board-for-raspberry-pi/) USB Audio Adapter The Pi comes with sound but only a low quality output, this adapter (https://www.adafruit.com/product/1475) adds higher quality input and output. Software The Raspberry Pi will need to…Continue Reading “Sonic Interactions Kit”
For centuries we have carefully handcraft the interactions of musical instruments, optimizing them for intuitive learning, playability and comfort yet many of the newest tools of musical expression are cold, intangible and use technologies in ways that ignore hundreds of years of accumulated knowledge. Sonic Interactions is a hands-on workshop in combining concept, craft and composition. This workshop aims to expand our creative repertoire by introducing basic electronics and coding in the context of musical instruments to explore a variety of tangible ways for us…Continue Reading “Sonic Interactions Workshop Preparation”