Category: News

Wednesday, November 30, 2022 | 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Innovation HQ, Building E38 3rd Floor
292 Main Street Cambridge, MA
RSVP Here
Dinner will be provided!

Visit the Voxel Lab for its first analog arts hangout! This is meant to be an informal time to drop in and create in community. Bring your own project or craft to work on – drawing, sewing, knitting, needlework, watercolor, musical instrument playing, writing, or anything else you’d like to do. Dinner will be provided! 

A note: Voxel Lab is equipped with sewing machines for use by members who have completed training or been approved to use them. Voxel Membership is open to all MIT Community members, and sewing training for members is offered regularly on Mondays and Wednesdays in the evening.

Wednesday, November 2, 2022 | 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm

Innovation HQ, Building E38 3rd Floor
292 Main Street Cambridge, MA
RSVP Here
Lunch will be provided!

Visit the Voxel Lab for its first analog arts hangout! This is meant to be an informal time to drop in and create in community. Bring your own project or craft to work on – drawing, sewing, knitting, needlework, watercolor, musical instrument playing, writing, or anything else you’d like to do. Lunch will be provided! 

A note: Voxel Lab is equipped with sewing machines for use by members who have completed training or been approved to use them. Voxel Membership is open to all MIT Community members, and sewing training for members is offered regularly on Mondays and Wednesdays in the evening. 

Concert December 03, 2021 | 06:00 pm

Innovation HQ, Building E38 3rd Floor
292 Main Street Cambridge, MA
Free and Open to the Public
5:30 pre-show talk in the Voxel Lab, E38-391

Join FaMLE as we return to in-person musicking with an exploration of ‘The Meaning of ‘Live’. As an electronic music ensemble, we focus on the intersection of electronic musical systems with collaborative performance. Our practice of network-based collaboration served us well during the pandemic, and this semester we augment that with musical experiences that can only happen in the physical world — including analog modular synthesis, spatialized audio, and collaborative remixing.

An important part of this has been our residency in the Voxel Lab, MIT’s new makerspace for music and arts innovation. Located in the Voxel Lab is an evolving eurorack modular synthesizer, comprised of an assemblage of commercial and DIY oscillators, filters, sequencers, etc., including a commercial module by MIT alum Will Stockwell. Each FaMLE member has been learning one section of this assemblage, focusing on how the physical and musical affordances of the instrument can be used to realize musical compositions.

We have also continued to explore computer-mediated musicking, and for the first time this semester are integrating Ableton Live into our software suite. Live is perhaps the most influential contemporary software for live electronic music performance, and provides a broad palette of synthesis and performance techniques. In addition, we are continuing to use the MLE library for Max/MSP, which provides a variety of networking and UI tools for our pieces.

As part of our practice each FaMLE member is responsible for conceptualizing a new electronic composition for the ensemble, and guiding the ensemble through the rehearsal and performance of this new work. As usual, our concert will feature a diverse collection of pieces, ranging from sensorial experiences using the modular synthesizer, spatialized audio and networked distribution of harmony, and a live remix of a Lupe Fiasco composition. 

Join us before the concert for a short talk by director Ian Hattwick on FaMLE’s residency in the Voxel Lab.

MIT event website

Facebook event

Friday, December 3^rd 11am-1pm

Machine Learning & Music Workshop with FluCoMa developers Ted Moore and Pierre Alexandra Tremblay

This Friday, music tech researchers from the University of Huddersfield UK will present a workshop on their toolkit for machine learning and music called Fluid Corpus Analysis. The workshop will mainly be using Max/MSP, but there will also be opportunities to talk about FluCoMa integration with other programming languages. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in machine learning and music to talk directly to researchers and developers working in the field!

The Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa) enables techno-fluent musicians to integrate machine listening and machine learning in their creative practice within Max, SuperCollider, and Pure Data. FluCoMa offers audio decomposition tools to separate audio into component elements, audio analysis tools to describe audio components as analytical and statistical representations, data analysis and machine learning algorithms for pattern detection and expressive corpora browsing, and audio morphing and hybridization algorithms for audio remixing, interpolating, and variation-making. Download the package and learn more at flucoma.org.

Join us for music, demos, hanging out, and pizza!

Voxel Lab Social Hour (or is it pizza hour now?)
Thursday Nov 18
6:00 – 7:00 

Voxel Lab’s Thursday Socials are an opportunity to learn more about the MIT music tech / digital art community, and meet other people with shared interests. While there will be plenty of time to chat, the socials will also feature short performances/presentations by Voxel Lab members on their work in the lab, and live music / DJ sets by the MIT community.

This Thursday will feature:
Philip Tan will demo and talk about hacking 45 rpm turntables for portable scratching! (Here’s an example of someone rocking a 7″ for inspiration :-o )
Matt Caren will talk about using the FAUST functional programming language to create the embedded DSP for his KeyWi music controller

All are welcome to attend! Voxel Lab orientations and safety training will be available immediately after.

Will Stockwell presents the Quad Operator, a public conversation and demo.

Tuesday Nov. 2 7-8:30pm
Voxel Lab E38-391
Free and open to the public
Moderated by Voxel Lab co-director Ian Hattwick

Join us as MIT Alumnus Will Stockwell comes to the Voxel Lab to share with us his experiences in designing and commercializing the Quad Operator, a Eurorack FM synthesis module.  The format will be a guided conversation and demo, and we are planning on discussing Will’s experience at MIT and his journey into music tech, as well as going into the details of FM synthesis, the design process, and performing with Eurorack systems. Will is a 2005 course VI graduate of MIT. He joined Dropbox in 2009 where he worked as an engineer for mobile until 2014. In 2016 he founded Humble Audio, which designs and manufactures boutique electronic music synthesizers.