3DMIN Symposium

Last week I was back in Berlin for an exhibition, concert and international symposium on Design, Development, and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments (3DMIN). The symposium was titled “Musical Instruments in the 21st Century — Identities, Configurations, Practices” and included a range of interesting speakers from the 3DMIN project itself and invitees like myself. The other speakers included:

• Alberto de Campo (3DMIN), Dominik Hildebrand Marques Lopes (3DMIN), Hannes Hölzl (UdK Berlin)
• Amelie Hinrichsen (3DMIN)
• Atau Tanaka (EAVI, Goldsmiths University)
• Dafna Naphtali
• Hans Tammen (School of Visual Arts, NY)
• Marije Baalman
• Sarah-Indriyati Hardjowirogo (3DMIN)
• Till Bovermann (3DMIN)
• Andreas Pysiewicz (3DMIN)
• Caroline Cance (Université d’Orléans)
• Deniz Peters (University of Music and Dramatic Arts Graz)
• Gina Emerson (3DMIN)
• Jin Hyun Kim (HU Berlin), Uwe Seifert (Universität Köln)
• Kai Siedenburg (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg)
• Song Hui Chon (Rochester Institute of Technology)
• What counts as success in musical instrument design? — A panel discussion with Alberto de Campo (3DMIN), Atau Tanaka (Goldsmiths University), Florian Grote (Native Instruments), Jin Hyun Kim (Humbold University Berlin), Mark Zadel (Ableton), and Stefan Weinzierl (3DMIN).

Ableton Loop

I recently had the pleasure of participating as a panelist in Ableton’s Loop Summit in Berlin. Our panel was titled “New Instruments and Evolving Performance Practices”, and was organised by Mark Zadel – a colleague from graduate studies at McGill and now an Ableton employee.

The summit was one of the most interesting, enjoyable conference I have ever attended. It was extremely well organised – despite the fact that there were parallel presentations and activities, it was easy to jump between them and try to catch a bit of everything since almost everything ran exactly on schedule.

Some of my favourite sessions:

• Thor Magnusson – “Sight and sound: visualizing music in software instruments”
• Norbert Schnell – “All Together Now: Interactive Music Making on the Mobile Web”