TEDxBrussels - hackerspaces

One of the main themes of this TEDx Conferences was 'hacking': building DIY (do it yourself) micro-labs to experiment with, well, anything – from microbiology to ‘Star Trek tricoder’ electronics to DNA sequencing to neurochemistry. The key is a very motivated community with the will to take a deep dive into the matter without having industry-grade equipment at their disposal. Some of these communities, or individuals, even find cures for rare diseases! See also http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/

As a part-time music producer, maybe I should start up a Hackerspace myself! It looks like great fun, and you meet new friends that share the same passion. Maybe a Hackerspace on New Kinds Of Music, perhaps?

An idea to start from: there was this speaker, Bruno Zamberlin.

"Bruno Zamborlin is a technologist, researcher, musician and designer. He's been working on a joint PhD in computational technologies between Paris and London, exploring new methods for gestural interaction and its applications in performing arts and the creation of new musical instruments. Bruno is interested in the topic of Interactive Machine Learning and the possibility of allowing the artist to interact with the entire supervised learning process and the creation and design of his own gesture vocabulary. The early results of this research is Mogees, which uses contact microphones to turn any touchable surface into a musical instrument. Bruno made a video illustrating Mogees that's had more then 300,000 views, furthering his mission to open up gestural vocabulary to impromptu actions and personalisation."

It sounded great!