Phonos became known and gained a reputation for being able to train musicians and composers on the use of analog and digital technologies. Now, partnering with the Music Technology Group and ESMUC, Phonos recovers that training tradition by offering focused workshops on music and technology topics, aiming to explain the most recent technological advances with a language understandable by musicians, composers and creators in general. These workshops combine the needed technical explanations with their practical use into artistic and musical productions.

Workshops will be conducted by pairs of experienced teachers, coming from research in technology and music making respectively, warranting a balance between straightforward technical explanation, and its direct application through artistic experimentation. They will be delivered online through 5 sessions of 3 hours, covering both technical and artistic aspects through explanations and creative exercises that will encourage collaboration and interaction between the participants.

Workshops

Network Music Performance with Enric Guaus, Víctor Sanahuja & Josep Mª Comajoncoses. 28 June to 2 July 2021. This workshop will explore how to perform live via the internet with other musicians in different geographic locations. This workshop aims to connect musicians from anywhere in the world and combine the musical and technical skills of participants with the experience of Sonology department of ESMUC playing network music to explore new ways of playing music together.

Introduction to Computational Creativity with Behzad Haki & Ángel Faraldo. 5 to 9 July 2021. This workshop will set the ground of musical artificial intelligence by looking at some probabilistic models applied to music making and algorithmic composition. It will start with simple models and evolve throughout the week into more refined models of music generation, including Markov models of increasing complexity. Sessions explaining theoretical concepts will be followed by music composition labs. At the end of the week, students working in groups are expected to compose a fixed media work using the concepts and tools presented, that will be released in the Phonos Netlabel after the summer.

Composing with Freesound with Laura Llaneli & Frederic Font. 12 to 16 July 2021. In this workshop, the online sound repository Freesound will be presented and participants will explore in depth its possibilities as a creative tool for music composition and sound design. The workshop will cover the basics of free licenses, downloading sounds, recording, editing and uploading sounds, as well as advanced features unleashed with the Freesound API, including text and similarity advanced searches. Also the workshop will show the potential of the Freesound API with applied examples in audio mosaicing and loop generations, and cover other advanced applications towards machine intelligence. Sessions explaining theoretical concepts will be followed by sound and music composition labs. At the end of the week, students working in groups are expected to prepare a radio show using Freesound content, that will be aired on teslaFM during the summer.

General information