This Friday, 18th May, is our monthly music night, starting from around 8pm in the lab. Come along to talk about music, hacking, and make some noise! The month before last I wasn’t there, and I missed out on Andrew and Tom’s resistive fabric synth, and James and Matt of Madlab making instruments out of jelly. Don’t make the same mistake I did: make sure you come to the lab on Friday!

This month Gareth is going to talk about using cSound to create sounds on your computer, and I hope we’ll have some live performances from anyone who fancies it. There’ll also be the usual blether and working on hacks throughout the night.

Bring your own hacks, ideas, news, and performances.

Hope to see you there

Alex

Last weekend in the Barbican in London, a whole bunch of hardware and software hackers got together for Music Hack Day.  Anyone who likes a bit of music in their hacks should check out this event, where everyone gets together for 24 hours and creates new and innovative music applications.  Sponsors like Spotify, Novation, Last.fm and more (check the MHD website, there’s loads of them) open up their technology, pay for the pizza and beer, and give prizes to the creators of their favourite hacks.

At the end of 24 hours, 62 different hacks were made, from Kinect dancing games, to owl keyboards, to musical t-shirts.  The London Hackspace were out in force, running a neat little room of hardware hackery that yielded some great projects.  They also wrote a blog entry, which you can read here.

To my mind, the most mad-scientist-worthy hack was the Helimin, a musical instrument that you control by flying a remote controlled helicopter across the room.  Evil genius.  Despite Terrible Manflu I managed to make a little facebook-wall-enabled step sequencer that I may yet finish one day.

If you like music, you like hacking, and you like sleep deprivation, you should go to Music Hack Day.  If you want to see the future of music technology, here is a complete list of all the hacks that were completed and demoed last Sunday afternoon.