Music Tech Fest

Music Tech Fest
Genre Electronic music, etc.
Dates 2012-present
Location(s) Wellington, Boston, London, Berlin and Paris
Founded by Michela Magas
Website
Music Tech Fest official site

Music Tech Fest (MTF) is a three-day arts festival and creative space where participants share and "develop new formats of musical performance and expression." It is billed as the 'festival of music ideas'.

MTF presents technological innovations and artistic experimentation, performance, new inventions, commercial applications, and academic research.

Music Tech Fest events are free to the public, streamed live online, and videos of individual presentations are made available on YouTube.

The festival runs a 24-hour weekend hackathon and an academic symposium known as the 'afterparty' on the Monday following the weekend's event. At the Boston afterparty, participants collaborated on the composition of a Manifesto for the Future of Music Technology Research.[1]

History

Music Tech Fest began as result of the Roadmap for Music Information Research (MIReS),[2] a European FP7 project run by seven European research centers: Music Technology Group at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; Stromatolite; OFAI, Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Vienna, Austria; INESCP, Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Porto, Portugal; IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; Centre for Digital Music (C4DM), Queen Mary, University of London, UK; and Barcelona Music and Audio Technology (BMAT), Barcelona, Spain.

The project's Scientific Director Michela Magas of Stromatolite launched the first Music Tech Fest event in London 2012 as a way to bring academics and practitioners together. The first festival included contributions from EMI, BBC, Spotify, Soundcloud and Shazam as well as academic researchers, makers, developers and artists. MTF London 2012 featured 54 performers and presenters, 70 hackers and 70 creatives.

In May 2013 the festival ran again in London with the additional involvement of all of the major record labels. In September of that year, Professor Andrew Dubber from Birmingham City University joined as festival director. In 2014, the festival went on tour with events in Wellington, Boston, London, Berlin and Paris. In 2015 festival organisers scheduled larger regional events, rather than focusing on individual cities: MTF Scandinavia in Umeå and MTF Central Europe in Ljubljana.

Starting with 2015, the Music Tech Fest is supported by the EU Horizon 2020 project MusicBricks which aims at fostering creative development of new ideas around music technology and supporting pilots which lead to market prototypes. This opens the pathway to reach a wider community of creative SME innovators.[3]

Hack Camp

Music Tech Fest supports the growing hack culture, and promotes it as an important source of creativity. The festival holds its own hackathon at each festival, MTF Hack Camp, which runs for 24 hours from Saturday afternoon to Sunday.[4] Like Music Hack Day events, the MTF hack camp focuses on music-related hack challenges, but with a particular focus on performance with tangible objects, physical concepts and new integrations between software and hardware. There are competitions held at each MTF hack camp where individuals and groups work in response to particular challenges that reflect the themes of each festival. MTF hack camp challenges have engaged with ideas of accessibility (London 2014), fashion and wearables (Paris 2014), and creative spaces (Berlin 2014).

The festivals in London and Umeå also involve a Kids Hack which Andrew Dubber discussed in an interview for WebTVspot as an 'opportunity for families and young people to get involved'.[5] The MTF website and YouTube pages show performances from the Kids Hack, of participants presenting simple gestural controllers and instruments. Some of the older 'hackers' showed some more complex projects including a remote controlled Tricopter with a camera which was connected to some video goggles to navigate and film the Tricopters flight.[6]

Festival contributors

Contributors to the festival have included: IRCAM, The London Symphony Orchestra, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, The BBC, EMI, RCA Records, Shazam,Last.fm, Ableton, Native Instruments, Izotope, FXpansion, RS Components, RjDj, WIRED, MTV, Microsoft Research, Cisco, Stephen Fry/Penguin, EU Commission, DMIC, British Council, Sound and Music, MTG, Fraunhofer Society, BCU, MIT Media Lab, Berklee College of Music, McGill, Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art, Ninja Tune, Warp, The Echo Nest, MusicBrainz, Reactable, Jamie Cullum, Tim Exile, Leafcutter John.

Media coverage

See also

References

External links