Putting together Sound Lab for The Beautiful Octopus Club

You may remember me talking about the Sound Lab project I've been involved with for a few weeks now. The project was part of a larger event called the Beautiful Octopus Club which is run every year by a charity called Heart n Soul.

The idea behind the Sound Lab was to use readily available devices for immediate, accessible, and collaborative music making. That was the idea anyway.

So on Friday (13th) we set up at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank. There wasn't a huge amount of equipment, but enough to need a few of us to get it all sort and working.

We used 3 zones in the lab. One for three iPads which were working together using Bebot, iKaossilator and Loopseque. The idea behind this was for three people to be able to make music together in some sort of collaborative manner.

The first / front zone was where we had a more ambient set up using Bloom, Thumbjam, and also Aeolian Harp. These apps worked really well together and whilst the original intention was that you'd have a couple of people making ambient music together in this zone, often people would use multiple devices simultaneously and that seemed to work really well too.

The last of our three zones was our singing zone. For this we used a max4live patch controlled using Mira. The idea was to be able to control singing or rather introduce some fairly extreme effects to a live vocal. This was really popular and there was barely any time when the zone wasn't in use.

I'm planning on writing another post on what I think I learnt from the Sound Lab as there are some important lessons that I'd like to share.