DS Orchestra Event

Just a quick post to let you know about an interesting event coming up in Liverpool next month. I mentioned in recent updates that I’ve been chatting with Ross Dalziel of Sound Network (amongst other people), about events in the city next year. He organised Open Source City which I attended, and did a really great job. He’s into creating music with technology, hacking and general geekery. What’s not to like about that? Well, Ross has an event of his own coming up soon at the FACT building in Liverpool City Centre. It will feature what he’s calling the “DS Orchestra” and anyone is free to come and join in. As the name suggests it will feature a lot of people using special software to make music with their Nintendo DS handheld consoles. There’s some custom software that’s been written for this by PixelH8, who some of you may well have heard of already. He’s pretty well known in the chiptunes scene and should even be there to play alongside everyone else on the day. You don’t have to have a Nintendo DS to join in you can use any geeky device as long as it’s capable of paying notes and making a tune. That’s good news for me as I don’t have a DS. I wonder if taking my laptop and midi keyboard along would be cheating? It might be a bit hard to carry around anyway, I’d need to invent some kind of harness, a true geek approach to the problem hehe 🙂

If you’re interested in getting involved have a look at this article on Wired.com. It’s 6pm to 8pm  on Thursday the 17th of December at FACT and it’s gonna be a lot of fun. Part of the idea is to get kids excited about technology and show them that games consoles can do s much more with a little imagination. Who knows, maybe we’ll inspire a new scouse Kraftwerk somewhere along the way, “Kaftwerk La!”.  So if you have kids with a Nintendo DS bring them along to see what’s happening, it’ll be fun. I’ll see you there!

Beep beep,

Dan