On February 22nd, we explored music beyond the auditory at the Experiential Music Hackathon. It was a fantastic day of talks, workshops, hacking and performances held at the Brooklyn Navy Yard offices of Weav Music.

Talks

Jay Alan Zimmerman, a composer, author, and multimedia artist, came up with the original concept for this event and led the organizing. As a composer who has become deaf, and co-creator of projects like Google’s Seeing Music, his opening talk set the stage for a day that aimed to make music more inclusive by enhancing the experience for everyone.

Kon Tsitsas, Adaptive Music Specialist at Weav Music, described their process for designing adaptive, interactive music experiences like Weav Run.

Allen Riley presented works like Electronic Internet, sonification of internet browsing, and the Dream Car, a sound and light environment inspired by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House.

He also brought Videofreak, a music and video synthesizer in the form of an arcade cabinet, from its home at the Death By Audio Arcade. Participants explored the “experiential game” throughout the day.

Johann Diedrick (aquiet.life) described how attuning our hearing to environmental sounds can inspire new ways of music making. From a workshop building aeolian harps to be played by the wind, to projects like the bird classifier at Newtown Creek, mobile listening kit and harvester.

Yago de Quay (meetgraviton.com) described how technologies such as gesture and brain wave sensors can turn the body and mind into an instrument in a live performance context. He shared context behind some of his projects like Lightning Guitar, Brainwave Controlled Music Show, and Interactive Music and Dance.

Rena Anakwe’s talk, “Building Worlds through Sound, Visuals and Scent,” described how all of the senses factor into her immersive performances. Emphasizing the healing power of music, she concluded the talks with a sound-scent bath that was a perfect finale as we transitioned into hacking and workshops.

Workshops

In the first workshop, Jay Alan Zimmerman and David Lu described techniques for visualizing music.

Then, they delved into some of the technical approaches to music visualization that powered their work for Google’s “Seeing Music.”

Kyle Luntz led the second workshop, connecting live audio with environmental sensors.

Participants used open source software and hardware (Pure Data and Arduino).

Kyle is an artist and musician, as well as educator at Beam Center, a Brooklyn-based non-profit who generously lent extra Arduinos for the workshop.

Hacking

With all of the workshops there was still some time for hacking, pizza, and meeting new people.

We hit capacity at the beginning of the day, and our amazing volunteer organizers like Steph, Alan and Vinay helped us handle the overwhelming interest in the event without breaking the fire code.

Demos & Performances

At the end of the day, participants shared what they worked on, interspersed with special guest performances from Viola Yip, Richard Einhorn/Ruth Cunningham, Jay Alan Zimmerman and David Lu. Jay Alan Zimmerman’s performance incorporated sign language and included everyone in the audience. He then provided visuals for a Richard Einhorn composition w/ the performer Ruth Cunningham.

Throughout the performances, visuals projected and reflected throughout the physical space.

Viola Yip performed with Bulbble, a DIY instrument that incorporates a circuit of lightbulbs as an interface for the audio and visual interplay for a performance

A demo of “Tongues,” by Alex Suber, Nathan Miller, Armand Bernardi: an augmented sound experience that classifies the mood and sentiment of speech based on its timbre, and uses this to generate music.

Alex Wang, Dan Cho, and Adam Rahman worked on “Windown”: a sleep aid application intended to be incorporated into a nighttime routine.

Halley and CJ demoed the sound of tattooing an orange.

Concluding the performances, David Lu aka Condrummer, demonstrated his unique audio-visual compositions

We livestreamed the talks and demos/performances and you can view them on youtube. Unfortunately the video framerate is low, but the audio quality is high!

Photos by Inza Bamba, Brenden Hussey, Vinay Raghavan, Allen Riley and Jason Sigal.

Thank you!

Many thanks to all who participated in the event and to everyone involved in making it happen! Thank you to everyone at Weav Music for hosting us, transforming their office to accommodate the event, and putting such care and thought into the planning. Thank you to Spotify for supporting pizza and live captioning. Thanks Stan(ographer) for captioning. Thank you Shagari Guity for graphics. Thanks to all of our incredible guests (Jay, Kon, Johann, Yago, Rena, David, Kyle, and Viola) for sharing their work. And thank you to the many volunteers (Alan, Brenden, Holly, Inza, Jason, Jay, Marium, Shagari, Steph, Taylor and Vinay) who organized on behalf of Music Community Lab!

Please reach out to contact” at ” musiccommunitylab.org if you’d like to get involved with future events!