Category: Audio Production & Engineering
Super happy to be made an Ableton Certified Trainer, and join a wonderful international community of artist-educator-technologists from 56 countries. Just 8 of us from the UK were selected since 2013, so it’s a real privilege. I am of course a technophile (=nerd), but I have a particular love for Ableton Live (and Push) which – now with Max for Live – is incredibly open, flexible, and linked to diverse forms of historical and contemporary music making in composition, performance, production, and programming. I genuinely love Live and Ableton and relate to their musical ethos deeply.
Lecture and Workshop for Ableton at Glasgow’s Question Session in the beautiful Lighthouse venue. Make music from anything.
Feb 8 2020 Free Entry – For all Info: https://www.questionsession.co.uk
For centuries. composers have been reaching out beyond the musical world into nature, science and other disciplines for inspiration. Pythagoras conceived of a harmony created by the orbiting planets (The Music of the Spheres), Newton attached 7 colours of the rainbow to the notes of a scale, composers like J.S. Bach encoded their names into musical motifs, and Villa Lobos wrote melodies tracing the New York skyline. This workshop enables musicians of all styles to tap into this vast and profound craft of ‘data-music’. This long-established but niche craft has now been given a profound renaissance with contemporary technology: Ableton Live with bespoke Max for Live devices (available to participants in the workshop and distributed online) allow a world of real-time music creativity beyond the limits of human imagination. We will demonstrate such techniques as the automatic translation of your name into melodies, works of art into rhythms, spider webs into virtual harps, live weather reports into MIDI controls and countless other possible translations. This approach provides a uniqueness and profound meaning to your music-making whatever your stylistic interest, allowing you to tap into the infinite and uncharted universe of musical creativity.
Looking forward to being part of this panel discussion (click for tickets and info)
The first event in a series, the AES London Committee present a discussion exploring the relationship between creativity and technology. Chaired by Phelan Kane (Chair of the AES London Regional Committee), the aim is to create a dynamic forum that features free flowing discussion and debate with contribution from panel and audience members alike.
The purpose of this evening is to explore the relationship between technology and creativity within the landscape of modern audio practice. What form does this relationship take? How do modern audio practitioners use technology creatively within their everyday practice and what role does the technology play? How important is the creative output of practitioners within the development of new audio paradigms? How is R&D influenced by current creative workflow trends? Does the realisation of R&D lead to new creative workflows and to what extent do creative workflows influence the R&D process?
Confirmed Panel Members:
- Mandy Parnell – Mastering Engineer
- Justin Paterson – Associate Professor of Music Technology, London College of Music, University of West London
- Sarah Yule – Director of Channel Sales, ROLI
- Milton Mermikides – Head of Composition & MMus Programme Director, University of Surrey
- Justin Fraser – Producer / Engineer, Avid Certified Master Instructor
Bridget’s book The Classical Guitar Compendium (Hal Leonard 2013) is now available on Amazon and Amazon UK
It’s a huge 160-page book of original (and beautiful) arrangements, with 2 CDs of Bridget playing the pieces.
The book launch at London Guitar Studio, with Craig Ogden, Gary Ryan and Amanda Cook playing a selection of the arrangements was too much fun to express in WordPress.
It’s wonderful to be involved in classical guitar virtuoso John Williams’ latest recording project. Details to follow, but the energy, enthusiasm and skill he continues to deliver after 200 CDs, all the accolades and well over a half-century of professional musicianship is astonishing and inspiring in equal measure.
I can say without bias that Bridget‘s classical guitar playing and arranging is exquisite and widely admired by musicians from Julian Bream to Tim Minchin. It was an absolute pleasure to record and produce her debut solo album, and the next is just around the corner.
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Here’s Tim Minchin’s masterpiece Storm, animated and produced by DC Turner and Tracy King, for which I had the pleasure of providing production & arranging services.
For a dynamic list of Hidden Music projects click here.
Hidden Music:Sonic is a collection of electronic works using compositional systems to translate physical phenomena of the biological world into complex mesmeric soundscapes. Source material include the DNA, colour and shape of microbacterial colonies, the population of blood cells during leukaemia treatment, the shape of the coronal suture of the human skull, tree-rings, MRI scans of the human brain and the passage of molecules through the cell membrane.
Bonus material! Album purchase includes 6,000 word liner notes, detailing the philosophy and process behind these works.
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Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Microcosmos is a sound installation project in collaboration with microbiologist Dr. Simon Park and Cameraman Steve Downer (Blue Planet, Life on Earth etc.). The DNA codes, colour & shape of microbacterial colonies are translated into sound design using a complex automated mapping system. The resulting soundscape reveals the hidden music of this spectacularly tiny world. Microcosmos has been performed internationally including the Science Museum, Royal Academy of Music, Art Researches Science Belgium and disseminated in international conferences. Here is an extract of the piece:
Some images from the installation below as well as a representation of the mapping system employed (from the hidden music liner notes)
