Intercultural interfaces (WIP)

Background

    Since November 2023 I’ve had the pleasure of working with Berlin-based Bildungsflügel NGO. They are focused in supporting kids with refugee status through free german lessons as well as workshops and activities to help them integrate. In this regard, I’ve provided a series of electronic music workshops to enable them in making their own songs through freely accessible equipment.

By organizing these workshops, I started having the idea of making a web-based music sequencer that could be freely and easily accessible to the kids and would also enable them to jam remotely. More importantly, I started envisioning the possibility of hosting more electronic music educational workshops and the potential this could have for intercultural experiences. 

Interface design Iterations 

By the end of 2023, the sequencer consisted of two principal elements: 

1. Rhythm sequencer:  This is purely a graphic design of the parameters the sequencer would have, it refers to a 8 channel sequencer. By sliding the blue horizontal line you could change the rhythmic division of the respective track. The grey knobs allow you to control basic parameters like amplitude and reverb. 

2. Online participants menu: Perhaps this is the part of the whole instrument that excites me the most, a world map where you can see who is also connected to the instrument. 

Within the last design iterations, I’ve started thinking of the sequencer as a circular instrument rather than the traditional rectangle grid present in most drum sequencers. This has naturally spiraled my research into clocks and watches

What we colloquially know as Time, the clock, is perhaps the most accepted and universal phenomena in this planet. Yet somehow, ironically, it remains the most subjective condition in our existence. If you ask someone how time felt during Covid, and then ask another person, chances are for some it felt like the slowest time in their life and for others the fastest.

I love the feeling of universality that there is when looking at a wall of international clocks. It just conveys an energy of Nowness like nothing else. 

Overall I want the design of the instrument to immediately convey this energy; to explain the intercultural aim of the instrument but still mantain an engaging and playful function. 

Thanks to the use of web sockets technology participants of the instrument can jam in real time irrespectively of where they are. In this regard, one of the goals of the intercultural interfaces project is to organize live jamming sessions between different cultures.  This could occur, for example, between a group in India and Venezuela, where a jamming session would happen followed by a meeting where the performers exchange and learn about each other’s cultures.

This could occur similarly to the Participative Audio Lab x Goethe Institut Caracas project I organized during CTM festival 2023. In this instance we utilized CC0 instruments, enabled by web sockets technology, allowing an international jamming session with more than 20 remote participants

Offline educational workshops

Perhaps the biggest and actual point of focus of the project is set on offline educational workshops and meeting points: thanks to the free and easy access of the web-based instrument, it serves as basic infrastructure for an educational setting.

Once the instrument is finished, the idea is to host a series of workshops to teach the kids about electronic music composition. More developed workshops could also teach the kids fundamental internet network principles allowing them also to learn more about their technoogical environment

The instrument would thus serve as an open example and starting point for kids which don’t necessarily have the access to electronic music equipment.