I was fortunate enough to get accepted for the CODI Hack sessions that are being run by Ty Cerdd, with a group of other composers. The sessions are about starting to understand the fundamentals of digital instrument design (and electronics), and although I've written about this in the past and have used a whole range of midi controllers and digital instruments, I've never really had the impetus or support to build something in a day, although I have tinkered in the past. This first session was great for a number of reasons, being able to catch-up with friends that were also CoDI composers, meet other composers and find out what they're up to and to learn new skills that are useful to anyone who used digital tools/electronics in their work.
The day flew by, the morning session focused on Max/MSP and granular synthesis, building and running some small programs. The next session looked at the Arduino platform and again there was some programming in a different language - the final session brought the the two things together and by this time we were able to build something that allowed us to control different elements of a granular synthesis 'patch' (written in Max) with a hardware controller that we were able to put together and experiment with. The future session will see us present our design and maybe do a mini performance...of sorts.
I was really pleased to be able to attend this sort of event in Wales, normally things are run in London, Amsterdam or Berlin etc., so to run something like this in Cardiff was great. Would really like to see other people extend upon this and maybe even run something up in Aberystwyth in the future. For more info on Max/MSP look here - https://cycling74.com For more info on the Arduino platform look here - https://www.arduino.cc