 Because since it's all teared down moment and still we have enough we have lots of people here interesting This is as well an interesting talk Because it's Helen Lee who's going to present us actually give us an overview Actually about what hackers you know in music Ment actually in the history. So it's a given overview I understood as well. She gives a certain examples and I think she's gonna kick this a little bit further because she's gonna talk a little bit about our current work and future objectives Also, Schneid euch an breitelt euch vor eine Großrunderplaus für her Hello Yep, so I'm Helen That's just Me on Twitter and so on to follow and get her to get up and get up and show you that there's just a lot of different Quelting and yeah, I'm going to talk to you today We're gonna give you a story To tell you the story of how a group of music hackers in the 1940s and the music technology for ever And they didn't know anything And how they were doing How they should do it or what they wanted to do And they just figured out the rules I'm going to give you a little overview of the coolest projects coming out of London and Berlin At the moment I was active in the hacking music scene in London for a while And a few cool projects I want to show you And before I start with my own story I just want to introduce myself I am a creative technologist Creative technologist People like to put you up there And I'm just curious I'm just curious I'm a nerd who does art I push each other My favorite things are electronic and hardware And with music technology And so with that in mind I make a lot of Strange musical instrument creations And this is one of my experimental instruments These are some of my experimental instruments I've taken them on restancies I've brought them to London, Shenzhen And to Copenhagen And I just really like experimenting with them And I'm looking for a way to look like an instrument I'm not sure how it sounds But for me I like my instruments to sound melodic So I just pull my edges the next time I'm doing it I also really like... This is made out of brass And I made a lot of metal And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit So I buy my own soft-circuits So I like electronic, soft-circuits And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit And I'm sort of a metal-made soft-circuit Incredible knowledge So these are some of my nice old musical instruments Which is just a background just kind of worked on So these are some of my very old musical instruments These are some of my new musical instruments Showlines... Screw recent город And I'm teaching them How you go about mounts Some are specific to this And it's a DIY wearable, portable, guest-based musical instrument for children who can program it. And I'll tell you about that project later. And I also do books with stickers and a crafty kid guide for electronics and with paper and origami and sewing and robotics. And I also write for Hack-a-day and I also write for Double-Eyes, no matter what. Anyway, about me? I'm going to tell you one of my favorite stories about music technology. I'm going to start with this story of a man who I still like by John Cage. Most people know his experimental music and his experimental compositions and his many pieces of writing about what an artist should and shouldn't be. He was also a very early hardware hacker. He also created experimental instruments since his deepest team. So he just made music with it, he composed it, but he was also an experimental hardware artist. He said there is no noise, it's just music. And I write that on it to remind you that all instruments are invented. And in the 1930s the violin was so defined. With new tools different instruments were brought together. And it was an instrument as a specific thing. We are a bit wrong. We played with noise while we were humans. You might think it's similar with compositions. You can remember the old Nebisi music as the classical music, as a potential establishment figure. But back then they were modern people. They had super popular music pieces and the deli. So basically anything that sounds strange to you, or strange to you, or experimental, can be heard in a long term. So yeah, actually we are all being told a conspiracy theory. I also have a conspiracy theory. The Nebisi A, the A-tone, 440 Hz, if we were to tell you, it was not even 440 Hz. It was never 440 Hz until the 1950s when a couple of people in London sat down and all of them wrote down and said, hey, it's 440 Hz. Before that there was a flute in Italy. And then there was a flute in France. There were these little tone differences. And so it wasn't until the 1950s that there was a definition of A. And there was a series of conspiracy theories where they said, hey, they chose 440 Hz as a alternative website. Now you can actually go and check it for like a thought control. And if you're looking for a 440 Hz conspiracy theory, then there are groups that work on it to change it. That the whole modern music is being used. And that's an idea that's 143 Hz and 448 Hz. If you want to be A camped, you're in luck because someone's made a music adjuster. So you can take a track and then convert it. You can take a track and convert it. And then the whole music is in this other A-tone. And there are people who say that there's another A-tone. But that's completely ridiculous. But I live it. So if you're looking for conspiracy theories on YouTube, maybe you should do it sometime. It's exciting. You're on the Congress. You can look at that. But the point is that music is all in love and there are no rules. I'm going to take you through one of the many parts of music. We're going to take a look at a special part of Hacked Technology Jan, where people did things with a device that you didn't think of. This is the magnet band recorder. And the Nazis made it popular for propaganda. And after the World War II, the BBC used the device and developed it. So the tone band is relatively modern technology. And it was used for real-time broadcasting. They were used in music studios. They were relatively expensive back then. And then they took Hacker, this thing. So these hackers took a series of these tone-band devices. And when people get into the hands of technology, they always play around in creative ways. There was music in Paris in the 1930s. There was a single one in Egypt. But in Paris, it was all in the center of music. What you see here is a razor blade to cut the band together. And then you get the music back. You can't just turn things around. You can do it faster or slower. If you do it faster, the tone gets higher. And if you do it slower, the tone gets deeper. We all know that. It was revolutionary back then. It was like science. Let's take an example. What happens when you play a violin? And then you play it. And then there comes this vibration. Many instruments have something like this. That they have this attack and this vibration. And with this technology, you could turn things around. And then you could make the sound out of it. And then you could play it. It was crazy when you could do that. You could also record outside things. You could record the sound outside. And record sounds outside. And then you could take it back to the studio. And then you could take it back together. And then you could just do it faster. And then you could do it faster. The first people doing this were French guys in Paris. And they were doing it due to modern digital preservation. And thanks to new digital preservation methods, you can listen to it. I don't want to lie. It sounds pretty bad. I don't want to listen to it. But it wasn't just about the music they made. It was more about the technology they used. This technology was very, very simple. Today it seems normal and familiar. But back then it was a bit more revolutionary. It was built in the 1960s with the Beatles. They used it in Tomorrow Never Knows. Normally I would play it. But when I played it recently, they switched off the live stream. Because there were ten seconds of the Beatles. I don't want to risk that. But the three of them, Tomorrow Never Knows, they were just flip-signs. They were just un-turned sounds. We did it slower and faster. We did it slower and faster. There is a very high sound in this song. And that's what people laugh at. And that's all done with scalpel. You can use these in modern music. We can use these in modern tools. In Ableton and Logic. These are standard tools now. But back then it was very influential. And now I'm going to talk about you here. The most beautiful thing about haka culture for me is the way that we riff off of each other's work. So I'm just going to talk about this artist and engineer. Her name is Daphne Oren. I'm talking about these engineers. Her name is Daphne Oren. And more than ten of you know her. Daphne Oren is an artist. And that's why she was a musician. She was a physicist and musician. She was unfortunate enough to be a woman. Unfortunately, she was a woman. She has a pretty tragic work history. But she is one of the iconic figures. She is one of the iconic figures in the history of electronic music. She is a train musician. She is a musician. She cued up these real-to-real magnetic tapes. She found a job as a backpacker at the BBC. She went to a training course in Paris. And she flew to a training session in Paris. So a standard film training. And while she was there, I think she met the people behind the music concret. And she met the people behind the music concret. It totally blew her mind. She was like oh my god. That is cool. She said it will revolutionize everything. She took it back there and predicted real-to-real. And she came back and told it. And you said no, it will go back to your work. But after the work, deep into the night, she went to the studio. She would explore and bring the roles to her own studio. And she tried these new methods. She was also an electronics person. She could use electronics. She experimented with electronic music. And then she started using the four kinds of music. And she was doing it for maybe five, six, seven years. And she did that for five, six, seven years. She managed finally to convince somebody to get it. And then she found someone who was interested in it and who had an interest in her work. And it was a success. Also, people hated it, of course. And a lot of people wanted her to repeat it. But there were people who wanted her to do more. Until then, BBC had a studio. I had a question for someone in the 50s. For a woman in the 50s. It was something very special for women. Unfortunately, at this point, it's called the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which is one of the most iconic sound design workshops in the whole history of the BBC. So she starts this workshop. But a year later, she leaves to start her work. But a year later, she leaves it to start her own studio, her own workshop. And they wanted my work, but they didn't... She said they wanted my work, but they didn't want to do my work. And she wanted my ideas, but she didn't want my name. From everything that she did, this absolutely iconic workshop. And she went off and created... So she leaves? She created her own? She created this wild synthesizer, which has been the huge synthesizer in the museum. Instead of... She loved looking at waveforms of music, so she thought she would use watercolour to draw the waveforms. And then I put the synthesizer in the watercolour. You can use it to draw everything in the synthesizer. Just a wild idea. She is becoming more and more popular now, more famous. On the one hand, because this old BBC workshop is still existing, the people are still there, but on the other hand, because she created more and more popular works there. That's Dibi Darbyshire. Have you heard of her? No, I mean, exactly the same. She was a mathematician and musician. And she came in somehow and she didn't get a job at first. And then she became the arranger and she made the music for this. Before I do, I want to try and find that. And I think that at this point every sound is physically cut and glued together. And there's no multi-track recording device. It's an enormous process to take up something, to get it together, to cut it off, to take it off and then add more sounds. There are several tapes that you have to connect to each other without multi-track technology. That means there are different devices and you stand there and you write a go and with that you get to copy it together. It's very blasé about it, it's interesting. It's completely crazy today to compose a piece of music as a toy. It seems to work. I think it's pretty charming. Why did she play it? Oh no! I'll just play it myself. Oh, she's playing! At the time there was no theory and no synthesizer. She also had her own music instrument, including my favorite music, the Vopio-Later. She used a lot of electro-engineering tools there. And now she ends up with copyright issues. I actually wanted to play one of her own songs. But she was also an electronical experimenter, an experimental electronical player. I think you kind of forget sometimes that music in the 50s and 60s was wild. This is one of her games from the 60s. I don't know what... But he recognized this track because we did sample it. So, DeAnth foot literally just wrapped over the top of it. So the lead is... DeAnth-View remixed it and just made it his own language. I think I'm speaking on an Azimov story. And this remains, but the Azimov story that it was made for has been deleted from the DVC archives, which I find to be an absolute tragedy. I would love to watch that. This is for an Azimov story that was told, but which unfortunately was deleted. And yeah, that's really tragic that the video doesn't exist anymore. And that's my story from the BBC Radio-Phonic Workshop. And I wanted to say a quote from an engineer. And I just thought this was a very deep subject. Yeah, because they were making things up. They weren't experts. They didn't know what they could do. So basically, they just mass-eranged it and ended up with something really special. And they got some of the biggest electronic music artists in the world. Electronic music artists are still taking part in the BBC Electronic Workshop. And so yeah, that's the BBC Electronic Workshop. And I think it's really important that we allow for business and technology. And we allow for little noises and we allow for dumb ideas, that are not so fully finished and yet we don't know why they're allowed. The power that's in there is to allow experimentation. It's never particularly successful in the beginning. It doesn't sound particularly successful, it doesn't sound as important. And people say to me, that was the golden age of modern music. We have a new technology that enables the availability of a new function for a large number of people. And it's this great change that people have made in music. For example, as an analogue, the way we make music was changed by these experimenters. And that was a golden age for new technologies. I think we're coming in a golden age where people are playing with experimental instruments, with experimental technology in general, with experimental noises. And we have many exciting new technologies that are available. We have a great microcontroller, we can create our own plates, we can create our own synthesizer, we can have access to people. And that's very important. Definitely, it didn't learn from it. It was an idea that someone else had. And that was learning tools and learning to get tools, learning new techniques and getting inspiration from other people. It's very critical that we change something and that something happens. At the moment, we have very cool and accessible new technologies that people know and it's much simpler to get them. And then, crucially, people are more accessible. People share, especially in the music community. They share their knowledge, they're free. And you don't have to be in the same room to do that. I know you're listening to the livestream. You don't have to be here to learn about things. You don't have to be in the room to attend a workshop with somebody. There's the one thing you want to do in your workshop. You have the whole YouTube tutorials. These communities are much more accessible, available through online places, online or online. We have all these great events. I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, this is one of my old Backerspace. This is a mechanical room in London, and it was where the music technology was cooked and it wrote and ripped off some things and they did it around the London Hackspace, but we did a lot of Mommy D.Q holistic and that was involved with me on a lot of the events that I think were leaders like this. Like whatever is this, this kind of work. is that Hacker Spaces and Makerspaces often also have music technology. And these central places where you share things, that technology and knowledge can share, and events can have, is very important. And I know why I put the photo in there. This was a wonderful space for three years, and then the landlord raised the rent, and the rent was four times more expensive, and the large groups of artists and music hackers were removed, and at the same time, the German Hacker Space, and the London Hacker Spaces in France as well, because they were very expensive, because everything was so expensive in the centre of London. And as a direct result of that, I moved directly to Berlin, and by allowing this kind of gentrification of Hacker Spaces, as much as you can do, as much as you can do, as much as you can do, as much as you can do online, as much as you can do, as much as you can do. So this is an example of an awesome online community, that's a YouTube video from someone from the London Music Hacker Space, and it's the most famous and most popular one, and it's called Look Mum No Computer on the Internet. He's an electrical engineer and generally a funny guy, and this is one of his creations. He's built a Furbys Intracellar, that's as terrible as you can imagine, maybe even worse, and it doesn't look that way, I mean, he really looks at you, but it's just, yeah. But he doesn't just show his instruments, and he doesn't just play them, but he builds things out of each other, and I learned a lot from his videos, and I looked at how he does them, and that's something that's very exciting, like 20 years ago, he probably had no access to these bits, and he probably didn't even know that he was interested in them, he probably had no access to them, and I would have my local paprika, and he would have said, hey, who wants to play a funny Furbys instrument, and the others would be like, what? No, I don't know. And it's exciting, it's a weird interest to share with others. And this here is another example, it's me and them, we've done a bit of furbys, we've done a bit of tech hacking together, and this is actually a version of Congress, and this is another version of Congress, it's called EMF Camp, which is actually in 2020, this is a really cool, really cool, little hacker festival, and these events, I don't know, just by being here, I've learned so much here, in the last few days, and every time I'm here, we should really, we should also support people, we should make sure that we have a true country, and by supporting these big spaces, and the band is also, by supporting individual people, who are put in here. So, I'm very happy to be here, I'm really proud of this community. Okay, a few more pieces at the end here, a few cool projects, that I've worked with other people. So, the reason I've chosen them, is that I'm showing you, because they're also using some of my favorite, some of my favorite ways to show how you can hack an instrument. So, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, how you can hack an instrument, where I'm in London, and I'm in Berlin, and my favorite thing, is to make an instrument and then come back to work, with more people, with two or more people, because the collaboration is always better than what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, and what I do, is that this is a sonic creature. It was originally a hack, a hack, that we did over the night, with Andrew Hockey and Christina from Oshkosh, and we ourselves, we worked over the night just to build this. So, it's a switcher's sculpture, you put the whole switch in the boxes, but the main parts, you see here, and they stand as art, for themselves as art. And this is, that's the Mojit creature created. And there's Jerry, who I think is in Prague, and they also build really great little things. So, my things are rather massive and not small and pretty, but it looks really interesting. I like it when you can touch this technology. Sometimes it's not too reliable, but it's just fun, also as a musician. And that led to finding a second creature. So, the utopian science fiction inspires me, and I have created a whole series of creatures that live the same world together. This is a more traditional instrument. So, in that sense, the first one was generative. This one is more like a note per lead. There is the most deep note, obviously. So, that's my base creature. And we're talking about a real musical for a real musical for a real musical and then I'm making her a stage present. A stage present based as well, but that would be more generational. Functionality is very traditional but in her form it's really strange and it makes it fun to play with that. My latest It's kind of like a structure, it's going to be human-sized and each of the men is kind of part of an arrangement. And every single leader here makes another part of a chorus. And you can modulate it by touching the individual copper bars. So this is the last version, one of the arms that comes out. And most of them seem to be just trying to make fun of it. So this can also snore. If you want to come up here with my snoring arms, this is a machine I'm going to use to fret. So that's a little fact. There are lightened bars in there, capacitive interface, and you can actually transfer the touch. But again, I could not build these things if my friends would not help me. And I would not be able to get the implementation that I wanted to be able to provide. So it's really nice to kind of like sit together and make fun of each other. Now, these all use one of these. This is not one of my instruments. This is a kind of my instrument. This is a trackable, big-same PCB, and it's not finished yet. I'll show you, because these are the sensors that I use. So if anyone has ever worked with capacitive touch before, this is like an MPR121 sensor plus plus. This is an MPR sensor plus plus. It has 20 pins. It's way more sensitive than it used to be. So if someone has worked with it and has difficulties, first of all, make sure that you're earthed. I'm going to do a whole slide about Bella and one girl about them, because then I'm going to write my own slide for embedded instruments. I like embedded instruments. It's about as big as my hand. It's very, very small. It's a full Linux computer. It's a full Linux computer. It's absolutely great. It reacts very, very fast. It's very reliable. It runs this. It's pure data. There's a language for sound creation. There are a lot of artists and sound designers and music designers. A graphic programming language for the creation of sounds. But this one's open source. So that's Bella and pure data. Someone checking out and interested in instrument design. The reason the Bella is special is because it doesn't run pure data. You can't get a microcontroller that will run pure data. Otherwise there's no microcontroller that can be programmed with pure data. So if you want to do something, look at Bella for the first time. Okay, that's that one. Then the other project I wanted to talk to you briefly about. The other project I wanted to briefly present. She's 13 years old, the artist. She uses the Mew Mew gloves. It's a gesture control. She controls. She makes looping. She makes effects. It's all very often with gestures. This is what she's using here. This is what she uses. This is one of the music tech companies at Mew Mew. I saw that in a video. When I saw that in the video, I was like, oh my God, I should have asked you a 12-year-old girl. And I thought I'd make one. They were going to do that for me. So I don't think I'm going to be in the classroom. So I just messaged Imogen and asked her if I could make a children's version. She said yes. She said yes. This is a wonderful piece of technology called Microgrid. It's the first microcontroller that made the first microcontroller. It does very well and very simply. It does absolutely well and very easily. The approximation of microcontrollers. It does very well and very simply. It does absolutely well and very easily. So I was able to make an approximation of this $5,000 glove with a value of about $10. She said that's what the core of the microcontroller is. Mini Mew. I haven't got time to talk to you about that. That's my leather robot unicorn. I can't tell you about that. This is my leather-clad guest control unicorn. So basically with one bridge, one microbit, I was able to get a little bit of software software. This isn't a microbit. She was able to get a little bit of software software. This is my $10 package to do very similar things. Of course that's not stadium level. But it's a fun project for us. That is my time. By the way, all of this here and how we did it, that's all on my GitHub. The whole code is available. If you go to my GitHub, you can look at it yourself. You can also use it for about $30. And you can follow along on my electronic adventures. You can follow my electronic adventures on my Twitter, Instagram and here on my GitHub. And I'm still a little bit here. So, let's hear it from the translator, Franz T. Ellen Lee. And? If you want feedback, send it to us with Twitter at hashtag C3T. And if you have questions, you can send it to us with the hashtag Clark on Twitter or Mastodon. Or you can use the IRC channel, hashtag C3T-Hall-C. Yes, he has a line, of course. There are far more speedy than we do. So, from the internet, have you ever considered to create music without human interaction? Okay, then next one. Thank you and have a nice evening. No, so... I like to build instruments, to create that you can stretch, that you interact with, interact physically. And I create a kind of person with whom you interact. But there are a lot of people who do interesting things with generative instruments, generative things. So, this composer with whom I have a friend, who is working on an automated... an automated mobile train. If the mobile trains fall down, they make noise, they solve noise. But I make more objects that you can touch. Practically, like with a multimeter, to go around points. So, for example, in fabric stores, if I work with fabric, it's not really meant to be a fabric, but you can just go to Conrad and go to a multimeter and measure. And test if it's light-fake or not. Okay, I think we're going to start with the flea market. Sorry. A question here from number two. Have you also created instruments that you can use physical objects that you have built instead of producing sound processors? So, you mean... like the tentacle, that the noise produced by the device is strengthened and acoustic, that makes the noise louder? So, if the flea market is done, then it will have more physical feedback, it will react more. It will practically react to your personal space in its personal space. You can not just sense touch, you can sense proximity. So, it can not only touch, but also react physically to it. Not uniformly, but you can get it to react quite nicely to its environment and also to its environment. So, you can put practical things in there, like the number of touches, how often people played with it, and how much touch there was, how many different people played with it, in a generative way. That's what we're going to do next. Thank you. I'm so sad, I really have to spoil it here. We have to end this now. We really have to do it. If you are here next to the stage, you can continue to ask questions next to the stage. Thank you very much.