Put interesting people in a room – watch what happens

One of the most important measures of success for us at Music Tech Fest is the extent to which new ideas are propagated through the community. Even better when people go away not just with great new ideas - but also great new projects. That’s one of the exciting things about putting such creative and innovative people in a room together. Quite often, they want to continue to work with each other long after the event is over.

Often, the collaborations that result from Music Tech Fest are unexpected pairings and unlikely partnerships. As a result of 2012’s Music Tech Fest, a well established independent record label (Ninja Tune) teamed up with a hacker (Ariel Elkin) on the Ninja Jamm app while a cutting-edge artist (Christian Blom) ended up working in partnership with an illustrious academic institution (IRCAM at the Centre Pompidou in Paris).

We love it when this happens. We set things up so these sorts of unintended consequences can occur. We sort of expect it…

But 2013 surprised us. The number of notable and exciting collaborations that resulted from Music Tech Fest was beyond anything we could have imagined. We put interesting people in a room together, and magic happened.

Some examples…

We connected Jamie Cullum with ROLI and Riff Raff Films. Jamie created some incredible and unexpected performances on ROLI’s new musical instrument called the Seaboard. Watch the the 4-minute taster or the full 18-minute video of Jamie’s performance.

Our hackers were challenged to ‘invent a new musical instrument’ - and the results were astonishing. The multiple MTF award winner Adam Williams created the amazing iPad-based ‘Quirkuitar’, which is to be presented to Matt Bellamy of Muse. This initiative is very much the result of the festival’s collaboration with the great Nikke Osterback.

The theme for this year was #makemusicwithanything and RCA Records threw a hack challenge ‘Make Music With Everything Everything’ by unleashing 330GB of the band’s stems for use by the MTF hackers. Everything Everything got inspired by Jake Dubber’s remix of Don’t Try which won the challenge, and decided to make the stems available online to find more fresh talent.

The beatboxers were natural collaborators. Jason Singh and Ezra met for the first time and teamed up with the young Ilyas Raphael Khan, whom Jason first met in Jaipur, to create a mindblowing improvised performance. Ezra showcased his work with technologist Cyril Laurier and the Bionic Orchestra‘s astonishing interactive glove, and then teamed up with Ariel Elkin who invented an eye-tracking beatboxing app called the ‘Bionic Looper’. He also joined in performance with Shlomo, who is gathering a looping festival lineup which will run as part of Music Tech Fest in 2014.

New initiatives resulting from Music Tech Fest 2013 include an artist incubator being launched by Steven Hill of Warp Records in order to provide a space for young and experimental electronic artists to develop. We can’t wait to see the results of this. Dubber & Jedediah, who met in the MTF hack space, are developing their award-winning hack concept Radiatr into a commercial venture.

We’re incredibly excited to see the legacy of Music Tech Fest reverberate through the industry, and can’t wait to bring more brilliant and creative music-loving minds together next year.