The beginning of 2020 was marked with the important milestone of the first-ever open music hack day being hosted in Mumbai. This post is to share some fun memories from our last in-person event hosted at Of10, Mumbai. We believe that we succeeded in our core value of culture building at the two-day event with a group of researchers, artists, engineers, and tinkerers: hacking, collaborating, sharing, and celebrating music technology!
Day 1
We began with a couple of introductory sessions.
Albin introduced the Music Tech Community India and welcomed the diverse group of coders, musicians, artists, designers, and makers setting the tone for the two-day event.
This was followed by Manaswi and Albin sharing the different topics and themes for the hack day. They shared some of their projects and ideas to set the tone for the brainstorming session later in the day with a collection of resources.
Aditya Nandwana shared his vast experience in designing and distributing hardware musical instruments (euroracks / pedals) as Animal Factory Amplifications. He led a discussion on the future directions of building hardware instruments in the context of Indian music, classical, folk, etc.
Tejaswinee shared some insights into her research work on the intricate connections between movement and music. She also gave us a sneak peek at some of her experimental electro-acoustic performances.
We had an amazing group of participants and this was the time for them to mingle with each other and the larger community. Brainstorming ideas with such a diverse group of individuals was a delightful experience.
We had toys to play with at the event like – Modular Synthesizers, Ceramic experimental instruments, Arduinos, etc. Few others showcased demos of their previous work or projects, which spurred some of the other participants onto their ideas.
The next event – Algorave was done in collaboration with the Algorave Community, India at a different location on the evening of day 1. It was a refreshing and super geeky live performance by Abhinay Khoparzi, tig3rbabu, eardrummerman, substance D with live visuals by weirdwithcode. You too can have a taste of this audio-visual feast –
Day 2
Participants continued working on their hacks in the morning, followed by a presentation session in the afternoon. We were joined by Prof. Xavier Serra (UPF, Barcelona), Prof. Preeti Rao (IIT – Bombay), Nitin Amin for the final presentations. Prizes were sponsored by Sankalp Gulati, Aditya Nandwana, and Dr. Meinard Muller (Audio Labs Erlangen).
Presentations were followed by an AMA session with Prof. Xavier Serra on “Career Paths in Music Tech Research and Industry” moderated by Tejaswinee. He shared his valuable insights from his immense experience in academia and collaborations with the industry.
Akash Sharma, an experimental artist, electro-acoustic improviser, and tinkerer, who runs the Sound.codes, sound research lab, and moniker, demoed his 8knobs DIY portable synthesizer and media controller to close the evening.
Music Hack Day Video
A big thanks to everyone who joined and contributed to the music hack day and helped in making it an enjoyable and learning experience for all. We also want to especially thank everyone who contributed financially thus making this event happen. For those who are interested, you can find more about the finances of the event at our Github repository.
We are very much looking forward to our next gatherings with familiar and new faces in the near future 🙂
