Tim Yates & Tom Fox: Hackoustic
Tim Yates and Tom Fox led the 24-hour MTF Labs at #MTFFrankfurt at Musikmesse. They’re also the founders of Hackoustic - a community of instrument builders, acoustic hackers and sound artists in London. They joined MTF director Andrew Dubber for a chat about taking things apart and putting them more or less back together, making new kinds of sounds, and good old-fashioned tinkering as a source of new innovation.
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SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, mtf, building, music, instruments, run, events, labs, musical instruments, acoustic, sounds, organised, hackathon, community, tim, venn diagram, idea, led, work, tech fest
SPEAKERS
Tom Fox, Andrew Dubber, Tim Yates
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. We are in Croatia right now running MTF Pula, something I’ll be telling you a lot more about next week’s podcast. But just for a bit of context, we’re working with a company called Infobip. They’re a communications technology platform used by the likes of WhatsApp and Uber. And they one of the fastest growing European software unicorns with over 1600 staff worldwide, headquartered here in Istra, or as they like to put it, probably the largest IT company involved neon, for context, that’s a population of 6000 people. We brought together some brilliant members of the MTF community of innovators and experts to this beautiful part of the world, installed them on the top floor of the Infobip Pangea campus with a view over the sea and teamed them up with Infobip engineers and other staff brought together from Canada, Colombia, Brazil, India, and right across Europe. Leading the MTF Labs, along with MTF founder Michela Magas is Tim Yates. Now Tim was also with us for MTF Frankfurt a couple of months back at Musikmesse, and Prolight + Sound, the largest music trade fair in Europe. He was working with Helen Leigh, Drew Fustini and MTF regular Tom Fox to lead the 24 hour MTF Labs at music master. Now when they’re not leading MTF, Labs events around the world, Tom and Tim run acoustic maker community and series of events for musical instrument builders in London. Toward the end of MTF Frankfurt, just as the team were putting the finishing touches on the final performance that brought together all of the things that have been invented and built over the course of the labs. I took Tom and Tim aside for a chat about hacking, about music, and about how bringing together diverse types of experts in this kind of way creates incredible opportunities for innovation. from him to Frankfort. This is Tom Fox and Tim Yates. Tom Fox and Tim Yates, welcome to the MTF podcast. I’ve grabbed you at the worst possible moment. Tell me what’s going on at the moment.
Tom Fox
We’re in the dying moments of a 24 hour MTF Labs, meaning we have not had much sleep in the past two days. Two days? Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
You’re in hour 27 of the 24 hour?
Tom Fox
Pretty much. Yes.
Andrew Dubber
So what happens between the 24 hours and and what’s about to happen now.
Tim Yates
We are organising all of the different projects that got made over the course of the hackathon into a performance in the main hall music lesson. So we are trying to get everybody plugged in and connected to pies and ready, you know, ready to play. So yeah, we’ve got a we’ve got a performance organised, organised during the hackathon. And so that’s what we’re going to be doing.
Andrew Dubber
And you’ve been running things here. Essentially, you are sort of two of the four who have been leading the process. Do you want to tell me a little bit about what you do and how you connect with all this.
Tom Fox
So I am a teacher, Design Technology teacher. I use music tech a lot in my curriculum where I work. I also run a lot of workshops, teaching people about building musical instruments. I also like to design interactive installations. So I like to explore how you can interact with music in different ways that you’re not used to and how just anybody can make music. Yeah. And then we together we run acoustic, if you want to talk about acoustic,
Tim Yates
yeah. Okay, so Hackoustic is a group, I suppose it’s sort of a loose collective of engineers and artists and instrument builders. And we’re focused around building musical interfaces that have some kind of physical or acoustic element to them. So something that isn’t just a laptop and speakers, something that has some kind of acoustic sound generation, or some kind of interesting physical interface. Because we feel that kind of embodiment of sound is a really important part of the way that we all experience music and sound. And sometimes that gets lost. If you just have, you know, laptop speakers or images with your synth and speakers. And I started the group, we started a group about five years ago, because there wasn’t anyone in London really doing that kind of thing. And we wanted a platform to show that kind of work. So we run festivals, and hackathons and bimonthly events, which are platforms for people to come up, bring their work and show it and share it with the community and share it with the general public, as a way of kind of bringing all of this very disparate work together in one place, is that you know, there’s lots of people working in lots of different areas that wouldn’t otherwise be in the same place. And so it’s an interesting way to bring this kind of work together to connect it,
Andrew Dubber
right does sound like from the name, acoustic, that it isn’t just about physical objects that make sound because a trumpet does that. This sounds very much like a land of tinkerers.
Tim Yates
Yeah. Right. So it starts in the blog and hackspace. So we started as a hacking group in the London hack space, as a place for people who were building these kinds of projects to come in share expertise and build things together. And it turns out, lots of people were interested in it, but people didn’t tend to bring projects to hack on, they wanted to come and see work and meet people and kind of be inspired. And so over time, we just gradually become more of a platform for people with with existing projects to come and show their work or for people to, to kind of have those, those experiences. But we we try and show the whole range of types of projects. So we go from like the hackspace hack projects, when people tell me just to tinker just wants to make a cool thing, all the way up to products that are, you know, things that are designed for production and are going to be sold in a commercial way and everything in between. Because the connections between these things are enormous. And it’s a shame. When those two mindsets and ways of thinking about instrument building and sound are separate from each other. I think that happens too much. So it’s nice to have them all in the same place.
Andrew Dubber
It sounds like both of you tend for instance, you you work with Drake music, and we’ll talk a little bit about that shortly. And Tom, you work in education. It sounds like hand making musical instruments is not anybody’s main job. Is that is that fair?
Tom Fox
Yeah, that’s fair. That’s Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
And which kind of begs the question, is it? Is it just sort of the realm of hobbyist because we hear all the time about hobbies dying, people have side hustles that don’t have, you know, they don’t have hobbies anymore. But there’s clearly that seems not to be the case.
Tom Fox
We’ve made it It started as a hobby even turned into a passion which turned also into a way to make money because people were commissioning me to build things for them. So I would build very, very unusual instruments that made very unusual sounds and people wanted to include them in the soundtracks or in the fair when they performed. So it did start as a hobby, I guess. But it’s led to so many more. corridors. It led me to MTF in Slovenia, many moons ago. And from there, it’s just spiralled upwards. And yeah, as we the events that we run in London, we’re never short of people to present their work. There’s always somebody who’s eager to show what you make.
Andrew Dubber
And not to put too fine. I’m wondering, is it all people who look like us? like white guys with beards?
Tom Fox
No, no, no, not at all. We’ve got a massively diverse community, because we, when we started this, there wasn’t much. There’s lots of people, but I also spread out around London, and we didn’t really know each other. But because we’ve been doing it for a few years now. There’s a real sort of core of people who we call our acoustic family and render life.
Tim Yates
So it’s fair to say before it is more men and women are probably more white men, and any other kind of ethnic group, but we try and we know that there are people from all sorts of, you know, a diverse group of people showing their work, and we try and represent that as much as we can. You know, it’s a, it’s a challenge to make that really clear all the time. It’s not always easy, but you know, it’s an important part of what we do. And you know, there are people out there making cool stuff. So we join, make sure that that happens.
Andrew Dubber
On the diversity front, tell me a little bit about Drake music.
Tim Yates
Okay, so Drake music is a charity that specialises in enabling disabled musicians to make music using technology. So we specialise in Well, I run the r&d programme there. So what the r&d programme is focused on is developing new technology and new instruments for people to, to be able to play so often, that’s bespoke instruments. So there’ll be a musician who wants an instrument to play in a particular way that they’re not able to do or you know, have an access knee, that means that they can’t play in a certain way, and they want to be able to. And so we try and pair people up with technologists to build bespoke solutions, and that we’ve had some really great successes with that. We’re also i’m also at the moment trying to build an accessible instrument library to try there. Lots of people. I mean, we’ve met a couple here, actually, the first of all, kind of people just making a little thing for fun, that they’re not sure what it what it’s going to be, but actually it can, it has potential to be a fantastic accessible instrument. And so I’m trying to gather all those little resources and put them on one place to kind of focus the development effort and focus people’s minds on trying to use the technology that’s out there. And to make it available to disabled we just have to try and to use so we can we can start iterating those designs to make them even more accessible. Tell me
Andrew Dubber
about actually running the MTF Labs, because I mean, attending an MTF and running one or two quite different things, what’s what’s involved, what is it you do,
Tom Fox
there’s a lot more pressure to make sure things are cohesive and everyone’s working towards a common goal. A lot of people come to these events with an idea already in mind and we’re quite sort of focused on doing what you came here to do. So the best thing about these events is getting people who wouldn’t even have an opportunity to work with each other. Get their minds crossed and see what comes up? Because he will get musicians who don’t often meet up with computer scientists in a social sense. And so their ideas don’t always
Andrew Dubber
intersect, I guess. Yeah, that’s the word intersect. Yeah,
Tom Fox
I’m pretty tired.
Andrew Dubber
Nobody nobody’s surprised by.
Tom Fox
So yeah, it’s, it’s quite important to get people to collaborate and properly collaborate and get the ideas flowing between different specialties. Because there are many places where that can happen except places like MTF Labs, right, we get such a wide range of specialties in one place.
Tim Yates
And I think a lot of people come with a particular idea in mind, but actually, if you ask people now what they’ve made at the end is not at all what they originally were intending. Because Because of that, because that happens in people’s ideas, you know, everybody who is low is really interested in the world are really curious and interested in pushing their own practice in new directions. And so you know, you might get an idea from somebody about choreography, or food, food performance, someone was talking about, you know, their ideas come from everywhere. And so over the course of the labs, people kind of take those ideas and absorb them into their own practice. And then what comes out the other end is something completely different or really skewed or, you know, put push in a different direction to what it what they might have originally intended, and is really exciting process. And then we, you know, we we then have to come all of us, we kind of we set everybody up and everybody kind of forms little grooves and starts making stuff and, you know, everybody splits off. And then we have to try and bring everybody brought together at the end to make a coherent piece. And, um, you know, it’s really exciting to see that work. And it means that this huge, diverse array of skills that are necessary to make that happen, so we got, you know, choreography, and we’ve got spoken word, and we’ve got, you know, PhD level computer scientists and artificial intelligence coders and music producers, you know, all of these, this incredible, diverse array of people kind of coming together to make this thing and I think it couldn’t happen in that way without that diversity, which is really exciting.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, and I guess the other thing that that kind of marks this out separate from, from what you might ordinarily experienced as a hack at a hackathon is this isn’t a competition. Right, exactly. And I guess that sort of puts a completely different dynamic or a different spin on, on what people are trying to achieve. Because it’s, it’s out there that you’re trying to impress each other, I guess.
Tim Yates
And the goal is to come together at the end exactly right, to create something, a single output, not a multiple tiered, this is the winner. And this is second, and this one, you know, exactly, which is a completely different kind of mindset, which, when you
Tom Fox
remove the competition part of the event, you free up a lot of the risk taken, people are more apt to challenge themselves and try something completely different, that might not work. Because they’re not afraid that it won’t win them win from this prize in the end. So there’s a lot more risk taking in these events, which is brilliant, because you get brilliant ideas.
Andrew Dubber
Also, we don’t really have any prizes yet. What have you noticed? I mean, because you both been to more than one Music Tech Fest, what have you noticed in terms of the difference between them or any kind of developmental change over time.
Tom Fox
And we’ll think of this as my sixth MTF event, and they’ve all been completely different. No two has had even like fifth, the only the only constant in each one has been a sense of community amongst everyone who comes to these things. But everyone’s had a completely different vibe. Some huge and chaotic and wonderful summer, be more organised and more relaxed. But I’ve been I’ve been MTF on both sides have been added as a participant and organiser. And, um, yeah, it’s it’s the community thing as always, which is fantastic.
Tim Yates
I mean, this is only my second one. And the last one was much bigger, you know, as a stock concert was five days, it’s a much bigger thing. And this is much more compressed. I think the thing, the common theme that I think is, I think is really positive is the fact that everybody is respected, that there isn’t a kind of a hierarchy of you know, the computer scientist over here, don’t, you know, don’t like that. Well, you know, the producers, everybody is respected, and everybody’s voices heard. And everybody has a chance to kind of contribute, which I think is a really, really positive thing.
Andrew Dubber
The output of what’s come out of the labs is performance, it’s going to be showcased in a very short period of time. And I can see looking at your watches, and the the the circle stage, just sort of in the hole down down the way there. What’s it for what’s what’s, what’s the purpose of doing that?
Tim Yates
I was talking about this actually, I think you need to you need a goal, right? I mean, I think probably everybody who’s a hacker has has that experience of you, you have a great idea. And you hack it and you get maybe 80% working or 75% working and there’s like a new idea or another thing comes along and it never quite gets finished and it never Quite works the way you want it to. And but if you have a kind of goal, at the end, it forces everybody to make it and make it work. And it’s it makes it more stressful. But it also makes it much more fun because at the end of it, you feel like you’ve got a really concrete, kind of a real positive and concrete outcome, which is really, which is, you know, gives you a sense of achievement. And because you’re then doing that in partnership with everybody else in the room, it means that you kind of collectively have this have this some sense of, of completion at the end, which if you didn’t have that as a focus, you would you wouldn’t have any, I think it would be a much poorer event for, you know, it really focuses everybody’s mind. And it means that it’s not just about the technology, it’s also about all those other skills, and all those other interesting ideas that people can bring in which otherwise we wouldn’t be able to have a platform and be part of the process.
Andrew Dubber
What can an audience get out of that
Tom Fox
phase, we’ll get to see what kind of crazy stuff that we get up to is. One thing I love that we’re at this particular event, is that a lot of vendors and a lot of the people visiting here are very used to traditional instruments traditional playing. I
Andrew Dubber
mean, this is a trade show for people who make violin bows and young guitar strings and those sorts of things. So it’s kind of an odd thing to drop in the middle of them. Yeah, yeah.
Tom Fox
But so they might not be used for kind of innovation that we’re trying to push with interacting with music. So I think I’d be quite I’m excited to see their reactions to what we do, because they, I, I can only assume they have no idea that this all what a big community even exists. Yeah, looking forward to that.
Andrew Dubber
Just sort of backpedal a little bit what brought you here, and I don’t mean like, you know, I flew on this particular airline or anything, but, you know, what we doing is kids watch you to the place that you’re doing now. I mean, what did your parents do? How did that affect? we’ve ended up.
Tom Fox
My dad is a definite Tinker, Tinkerer, not Tinker. He was always building things. He told me about electronics. When I was a kid, I was always taking things apart to see how they worked. I couldn’t always get it back together again. But I enjoyed seeing how things functioned. So my curiosity about building things and making things definitely is stemmed from my father. Yeah, is that How’s that? How far back? You want us to go?
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, absolutely. Tim,
Tim Yates
yeah, I I’ve always been a musician at heart. Ever since I remember, I’ve always wanted to be a musician. It’s always been absolutely fundamental part of my life. My my background, actually, as a musician is I studied classical music, I studied classical guitar. And I got quite far as Actually, I was doing a Master’s at Royal College of Music in classical guitar, just when I started doing this kind of stuff. Because I got frustrated, I was also doing composition to actually I actually studied composition as well. And I was in switched a composition masters because I got frustrated with the limitations of a traditional instrument. Because I, you know, I started to experiment with materials and found objects and sound and toys and things like that. And, you know, if you’re playing a quarter of a million pounds, Stradivarius or whatever, then you can’t scrape it with a piece of metal and bash it and hit it. Because you know, people get upset if you do that kind of stuff. Yeah, you got a Steinway. Similarly, you know, when you can, but you guys, right, exactly. Right. That’s a Yeah. So So I so I, I kind of I got frustrated with the classical guitar in particular. So I put that down and decided I took the exact opposite route. And I was going to just build instruments that I could build myself in like 10 minutes before I quit, and still make incredible music with and explore that area. And from that I’ve just gone on to do all sorts of, you know, the foam insulation and things like that. So that’s where I come from in terms of making
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, and Tom you’re known for working with found objects, as they’re sort of a story behind that.
Tom Fox
Yeah, to an extent I am. I wanted to start building instruments just because I love collecting instruments, I have a passion for lots of different types of instruments. But I realised that if I start building them, and I do it wrong, in my pitch is a waste of money and resources. So I just started building them from recycled materials, I really limited myself to just focusing on making sure everything was found or recycled or reclaimed. That actually led me to be more creative with the stuff I was making. So I ended up using recycled electronics and motors for pickups. And that led to developing instruments based around the things I found as well. So I started a whole organic process of building instruments based around the stuff I found and um, yeah, sort of spiralled out of control from there.
Andrew Dubber
Because most of the things that you make done with like musical instruments, I mean, some of them do but they’re actually books get up being turned into guitars or you know, but but typically speaking, I mean, I’m thinking of your spring flair
Tom Fox
does bring anything over, there’s, um, there’s a law of physics, which is Faraday’s law of electromagnetic induction. And that’s my favourite law of physics, because you can do all sorts of bonkers stuff with it. It’s how motors work. It’s how speakers work. It’s how electric guitar pickups work. And they all use the same bit of physics. So you can manipulate that piece of physics to have them all interact with each other to create really interesting sounds. Really interesting ways of playing music as well,
Andrew Dubber
how much of a Venn diagram overlap is there between interesting sounds and good music? I think
Tim Yates
that more or less completely overlap. You know, I just think that there are more interesting sounds out there than often get, you know, a lot of the most interesting sounds, I feel get engineered out of instruments, right. And so what we can do as hackers is we can, we can kind of make things in a way that we’re not engineering any of that stuff out. And that means that you can explore that territory in a way that just isn’t available in a more engineered environment, you know, all those, all those rough edges, all those things are things that might be a noise if you’re playing Beethoven, but if you’re, if you’re kind of exploring Sonic textures, actually is the meat of the material that you need. And that’s the depth, that’s where the depth comes. And so the opportunity in finding those edges is enormous. And an infinite amount of that stuff out there, you know, to explore. And so I think that, obviously, there’s a place for those engineering thing. And I bet Heaven is wonderful. But it doesn’t end there. There’s just it just expands the vent. It really just expands the Venn diagram from this small circle in the middle, and then noise to actually just like an infinitely sized Venn diagram of cool, interesting stuff. You know, everything.
Andrew Dubber
Right, so what are we going to see on the stage,
Tom Fox
we’ve got lots of gestural control. We’ve got 10 micro bits connected together to control sampled
Tim Yates
WAV files that people have also used in the composition from a track or phone side. So we’re doing stuff like that we’ve got sort of a sculpture, a tree, Sonic sculpt, sculpture, which uses as touch and synthesis on a billboard, to generate a kind of cool interactive installation
Tom Fox
for a modular synthesiser that uses a piece of physics equipment that records gravity fields. So as for gravity, since that’s going to be playing some stuff,
Tim Yates
isn’t it? There’s an inverted record, play. Oh, yeah, we’ve made inverted impressions of a record. Yeah, Byrne has made inverted impressions of a record. And so here we’re kind of
Tom Fox
overheads are actually like now low and overloads. Naturally high. Bandwidth has been
Tim Yates
making those
Tom Fox
and a bunch of other stuff.
Tim Yates
Loads of really,
Andrew Dubber
and it’s your job to try and make those on being one
Tim Yates
of these things. Exactly. Right. So you know, it’s been fun day.
Andrew Dubber
Well, absolutely. Good luck with that. Thanks, guys, for being part of this today.
Tim Yates
Cheers. Fabulous,
Andrew Dubber
thank you. That’s Tom Fox and Tim Yates at MTF Frankfurt a couple of months back with huge thanks to Musikmesse Frankfurt. Right now Tim’s here in Croatia with us leading the MTF Labs at Infobip, which has been incredibly inspiring and in a way that we hadn’t anticipated. Absolutely groundbreaking. And so all of which much more next time around. In the meantime, have a great week and we’ll talk soon Cheers.
