Insider Interview: Michela Magas of Music Tech Fest

By Keith Nelson Jr.

Throughout history, renaissances have been marked by individuals pushing conventions in response to present day needs and/or deficiencies. The recent music technology boom, which sees music streaming services outperforming traditional models of music distribution, has developed its own renaissance. Instead of composers manipulating scales and functional tonality, there are app developers creating sound from colors and controlling music selections with webcam hacks. London-based research lab Stromatolite Music Tech Fest is a paradigm in the burgeoning evolution of music technology that has turned every smartphone into an MP3 player with a series of talks which join together creative minds from all over the music industry (app developers, record label execs, etc). Stromatolite co-founder, Michela Magas elucidates the purpose and goal of this audacious endeavor in an interview with SoundCtrl.

SoundCtrl: What was the reason for Stromatolite to begin the Music Tech Fest?

Michela Magas:: We wanted to bring all the guys doing great things with music tech – hackers, startups, researchers – together with music industry people – all under one roof. We are working on a European project at the moment with seven great EU research centers looking at where this whole field might be going. We set it up as a “festival of music ideas” – a creative event where everyone can come together and demo, perform, create. It turned out that everyone we talked to thought this was a good idea.

SC: It looks as if this gathering of the minds is yielding interesting results. I tried out the Synaesthesia app and was blown away with how intuitive it was.

MM: Oh cool, that’s really great. You know we only did that one as an incentive for people to interact and create together during the fest? But it turned out more people were interested.

SC: Any plans to develop it further and add more features?

MM: Yes totally. You see it was created on a shoestring budget and everyone involved had sleepless nights. It wasn’t even in our remit! We just really wanted to do it. So of course we now need to expand it so people can upload their own sounds and match them to the colours they associate with them.

SC: I never thought of that. I suggested adding new sounds but that is pretty ingenious to allow users to match colors to whatever sounds they want.

MM: Well that would make sense because if you read up about synaesthesia you’ll find people associate different colours and sounds. But what was cool was that everyone wore the Music Tech Fest T-shirts in the “testcard” colours so people were “scanning each other.”

SC: What trends in the music tech industry have been addressed at these Music Tech Fest events?

MM: Things like visualising music, hacking into and sonifying ordinary objects, music rights, new tech which allows more efficient music licensing, music-making apps, performance tools and setups… all videos are now being uploaded on our YouTube channel.

SC: What about music streaming? That seems to be a big topic in today’s changing climate on digital music industry.

MM: Yes that too. And sonifying the Twitter stream. So not just ordinary streaming. Companies like Spotify and Last.fm now allow their APIs to be used for the creation of great new apps. Apps and interesting interfaces (both visual and tangible) are definitely top of the list in how those companies see their interaction with listeners.

SC: There was a Tech Talk two weeks ago. How was that event?

MM: Robert Kaye from MusicBrainz was over for the Music Hack Day London and said – hey guys, how about we record a Music Tech Talk? So we got into gear and set that up with our partners Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London. This MHD event sold out in about 18 minutes.

We had Matt Black from Ninja Tune presenting the new Ninja Jamm app - a great tool for jamming together. We also had a superb performance from Jason Singh – a beatboxer who makes tech to support his voice.

Photo credit: Jamillah Knowles

SC: Any plans for bringing an event to the United States?

MM: Yep – lots of people are asking. People are suggesting NYC or San Francisco but we also have a great community in Portland, OR we are looking at. We need people to help us take this forward. We did everything on a shoestring budget with the first one, with some help from the MIReS funding for our EU project and some help from the EU regional funding. We need to see who’s into backing a truly creative underground crowd and take it to the next level. The BBC introduced their podcast on the Music Tech Fest as “the future of music.” We were really surprised, but maybe there’s something in that.

SC: Are you guys familiar with the TED talks series? I feel a demonstration of a Music Tech Fest app at one of these speaking events would do wonders

MM: Yeah – in fact our idea was that the Music Tech Talks were “half-TED, half-gig” ( i.e. more performance but still intelligent ideas).

SC: The festival caters to an “underground crowd” as you have said and includes hackers. With Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom being indicted and attempting to start his own music store, what discussions have been had on the legislative aspect of the burgeoning music tech industry?

MM: We had talks by music industry legal guys about music rights and about people looking at ways in which music industry will pre-clear rights for licensing. We also had many discussions about how important it is to be able to access music files to develop great music apps. We are really keen that the developer crowd has access to content.

SC: What do you see the Music Tech Fest evolving into?

MM: Firstly, I’d like to see all the guys and gals making interesting things with sound and tech in some less exposed corners of the planet team up with some of the well-versed research centers and startups. We are looking at taking the festival to Croatia which is entering the European Union next year. There are some great people in that part of the world doing both music and tech but they don’t get much exposure. So – I’d like it to be the place where we evolve new ways of making music, collaborating, sharing, inventing new formats, and generally regenerating the stale old methods of the music industry.

A trip through the Music Tech Fest’s YouTube channel  will take you across ping-pong tables that play music based on performance (TripPong), online repositories for guitar chords (This Is My Chord) and other demonstrations. The old-school Casio hacks are impressive novelties but there are apps such as Sonaris, a music discovery tool based on real-time musical quality analysis which presents a comprehensive database for licensing songs. All of these discussions and innovations stems from an organic reaction to present-time events even the planning of the Tech talks. With an expansion into more areas the music technology renaissance may soon have a centralized hub to concentrate the vast create minds to produce truly world-shaping inventions.