So it begins…
We organized a community kick off event at Bengaluru, to bring together all people interested in music technology. We had around 30 enthusiasts come together at the coworking space 91Springboard Bengaluru. We were a healthy mix of developers, artists, hobbyists and musicians.
There were a couple of aims in organizing the kick off:
- Introduce music technology to everyone
- Brainstorming on the directions for the community
- Share ideas and collaborate
- Getting to know our community better
For those who missed this pop up event, I shall summarize the main events of the evening. After a half hour of informal socializing, we began with a talk on the introduction of music technology. Explaining the vastly inter-disciplinary pillars of music technology is a tough task and we made an attempt at putting a framework to it. We then had a breakout and demo session. Here we demonstrated on-the-fly music programming languages like Chuck, graphical programming languages like Pure Data and Max MSP, and a couple of media projects built using Openframeworks and Processing (open source languages for media art and visual design). We then demonstrated some resources for research in music technology – libraries like essentia, librosa; datasets like freesound. We also demonstrated Max for live plugins for new ways to explore textures of sounds, rhythm sequences etc that you can use inside your music projects. There are many other aspects that we couldn’t demonstrate in this kick-off session but plan to get into in future themed sessions.
If all this seems unfamiliar to you, don’t be alarmed. That is the exact point of the community. To bring people of different expertise but with a common passion for music technology, together, so we can learn from and collaborate with each other. We are going to release tutorial sessions for each of the demonstrations.
If all this seems familiar to you and you have worked on any fun projects, do share it with us. This platform is an open community for music tech enthusiasts to share their projects, collaborate and showcase. I am sure, you will find more people in the community that share your passion to make something cool, quirky and musical.
At the end of the event, we collected feedback from all the community members about what they would like to give to and receive from the community. We had an overwhelming sense that everyone learnt something new about what music technology really is and were excited about its possibilities. We are hoping to move the community in directions that everyone is excited about and we are very happy that we have you all on board.
… and so it began!
