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Last Wednesday Chicago's “Sound Hackers” met once more at 1871 for a small eight-demo concert showcasing inventions such as custom built synth circuits, iPhone hearing aid demonstrations and digital tracks composed from scratch by high school students.
The idea of a series of show-and-tells had emerged from the first meeting last month. As one member from the gathering put it, "I feel like I can't start working with others until I get a sense of their work."
A few demos were ideas already brought to fruition in startup form: Andy Sabin gave a runthrough of Ear Machine's iPhone hearing aid and Adrian Holovaty shared expanded sheet music features on his site for self-taught musicians, Soundslice. Peter Speer, who launched LittleBits, demonstrated the capabilities of the modular electronics kits that his company produces.
The diversity of the crowd at “Sound Hackers” is unique, bringing together “recovering guitar app makers," artists putting together potential sound exhibitions, as well as hardware supply-side representatives.
Ricardo Garcia of Base10 Labs had brought the group together out of a desire to recreate the creative tech circles he had on the East Coast. With many more who had wound up on the waiting list unable to attend, the group is quickly outgrowing the space at 1871. Although the next Sound Hackers event is planned to be a speaker event, not a show-and-tell, the variety of products showcased so far prove that there are many more innovations to show next time around. Here are a few of the products from the meeting:
Startup products
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1. EarMachine: iOS hearing aid-like application. Realtime sound processing on mobile devices.
Andy Sabin colloaborated with Ricardo Garcia in producing a free iPhone app released by his audio software company, Ear Machine LLC, that allows users to bypass the $2,500 cost of a hearing aid. Users can simply plug in a pair of earphones after picking the "loudness" and "fine-tuning" parameters to hear sound generated in real time.
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2. Soundslice: Responsive sheet music player
Adrian Holovaty’s experiences range from developing Django to founding Everyblock, but he brought his pastime as a guitar player into developing Soundslice. He demonstrated the newest feature of the site, a dynamic sheet music interface “for the real musicians who don’t use this silly tab system.” The interface retained all the previous features of splicing, looping and varying the tempo, even playing built-in audio separate from the original track.
Hardware demos
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3. LittleBits: rapid prototyping kits including the Synth Kit (Korg partnership)
Peter Speer Kickstarted LittleBits, maker of small modular electronic components that snap together magnetically for a variety of possible robotic outputs. For the Sound Hackers, he introduced the Synth Kit, which included oscillators, a delay, a keyboard, a small speaker, and other components that interact with other LittleBits circuits. Using his bare hands, he also played sounds using the kit's open backboard (a circuit bending method called "laying of hands).
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4. Capsule: Sequencing, synthesis and Arduino
Michael Una experimented with six different versions of a playable Arduino-based instrument he is calling the Capsule (pictured is the fifth version). With the press of a few buttons, Una demonstrated how he could select a note, put it on a step, or transpose it, creating complex patterns. Its circular layout is meant to give musicians a more natural handle on musical control that circumvented the menu structures and bypass traditional linear musical progression. He plans on launching a Kickstarter for the project in a month.
Lab projects and learning toolkits
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5. Teaching HS Students How to Program with Algorithmic Composition
Teaching high school kids at Lane Tech College Prep, Jeff Solin is opening a new Makers Lab at Lane Tech and leading their robotics team to the Robotics NASA World Championships on the Engineering Inspiration Award. After attending a workshop on Earsketch, he incorporated the app into his Media Composition class to teach them algorithmic composition using python programming to create custom digital tracks.
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Brian Pardo demoed an interactive adjective word cloud completed by PhD student Prem Seetharaman at the Northwestern University Interactive Audio Lab, which he runs. They mapped about 1,500 word associations for various distortions on a base track allow for playable reverb map corresponding to different adjectives such as “underwater” or “chaotic.” He also extended an invitation to the Midwest Music Information Retrieval Gathering on June 15, an academic conference relating to “music, sound and interfaces,” which he hopes will help bridge the gap between the perceived “ivory tower of academia” and those in industry.
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7. Prime numbers and perceived non-repetition of patterns
Daniel Lindmark of hardware coworking space Catalyze Chicago began by mentioning the resources at his space for Sound Hackers: it's stocked with physical products, offers shared desk space, machine shop and rapid prototyping tools. For the Sound Hackers, he shared a soundscape composition method of creating random sounding sound textures from tracks repeating on prime number cycles.
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8. Mixploration and SynthAssist: Creativity support tools for audio production
Also a member of Pardo’s lab at Northwestern, Mark Cartwright developed two tools that made advanced sound techniques accessible to a novice. Mixploration changed the mix interface into two steps: an exploratory mix chooser and a refinement stage that customized the final mix. SynthAssit searches off of an initial vocal recording and refined results on a rating system until it reached the closest track. As Lindmark asked, “You mean that my lifelong dream of of going ‘wa-wa-wa’ and turning that into a patch is finally here?” “I’m trying to make that happen,” was the reply.
