Festival charts 60 years of music made with machines
A three day festival at the University of Sheffield is opening up 60 years of music made with machines and computers to the public. Tape to Typedef will provide three days of free concerts, talks and workshops (30 January 2013 - 2 February 2013) for free and organisers want to take the public outside of their comfort zone to experience new sounds and have a go at creating new music themselves. "Electroacoustic music begins with recorded sounds that are then manipulated on the computer," explains Adrian Moore from the University's Department of Music. "People commonly cite Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) such as Squarepusher or Aphex Twin as examples of electroacoustic music we're familiar with today; others trace its history through pioneers like Karlheinz Stockhausen. You can hear examples of it in creative sound design for films and games, but not many people are aware of what it is or how it's made. "Tape to Typedef is partly to showcase the huge amount of creative work out there. And some of the best known practitioners in the UK are actually the headliners at the event - Jonty Harrison, John Young, Pete Stollery, Andrew Lewis, Leigh Landy and Simon Emmerson, amongst many others." The festival charts how electroacoustic music has changed over the past 60 years, from Erik Satie using a typewriter to create sound on stage in 1917 to post-war electronic instruments like the Theremin, oscillators and filters (used by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to create the famous Who theme tune), to the CDs and mp3s of the late twentieth century and our current mobile technology which makes real-time performances portable.
