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Last weekend was not just the very much needed August bank holiday, it was also our last workshop for the Hacked Human Orchestra project *sob*! The workshop took place at the absolutely lovely Shambala Festival in  Northamptonshire, which prides itself as being a ‘..space to play, to reinvent and revitalise…’. We couldn’t agree more :)

With us were our awesome collaborators on the project, Guerilla Science, PhD student Shauna Concannon and Hannah Perner-Wilson from Kobakant. It was a pleasure to have Hannah with us as Kobakant have been an inspiration to us throughout the project and have helped us along the way with the design of the wearable instruments.

Like Wilderness Festival a couple of weeks ago, participants at the workshop made wearable pianos:

Beatbox machines:

And a new screech instrument!:

The latter we are VERY proud of, as for it we designed our first PCB:

Like at Wilderness, after finishing their instrument each participant went and played it for composer Florian Lunaire who is creating a track from all the sound samples he took. We can’t wait to hear it and when it’s finished you’ll be able to listen to it on our website. We will also be releasing all the learning materials from the project on our Workshop Material page.

We would like to thank a number of people for helping us with the project; Lush Projects for helping us with the piano instrument as Iain very kindly provided us with the circuit diagram for it, the Royal Academy of Engineering for supporting the project and Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro for letting us use their circuit from the Chiptune Marching Band project for our screech instrument.

For more images from the Shambala workshop, please see our Flickr stream.

Last Saturday we hosted with Guerilla Science the first installment of the Hacked Human Orchestra workshops at our lovely home, The Centre for Creative Collaboration. We’ve been very lucky to work with Shauna Concannon, who is studying for her PhD at Queen Mary, and Kobakant (Mika Satomi and Hannah Perner-Wilson) both of whom have been working with us on developing the workshop.

Our wonderful participants stitched an elaborate soft circuit which will power a wearable piano and also made sensors including soft circuit pompoms, french chains, buttons (or keys) for the piano and even dino-style spikes!

Soft circuit for a wearable piano

Dino spike which closes a circuit when squeezed!

Soft circuit pompom, made with conductive and non conductive yarn, good to use as a tilt switch.

Learning about the circuit for the wearable piano.

Testing the circuit with a button/piano key made from conductive fabric, felt and foam.

The Hacked Human Orchestra workshop space.

The next stage is to take the project to Shambala and Wilderness festivals where festival-goers will add to the circuits made in last weeks workshop, creating a wearable piano, and also work on more instruments as well. The result will be a walking, soft circuit orchestra which will be lead by composer Florian Lunaire.

Our presentation and the learning materials from the workshop can  downloaded here and you can find more images from the day on Flickr. A great video of the day, created by Debbie Davies is below:

This project is generously being supported by the Royal Academy of Engineering.