As part of CTM: Festival for Adventurous Music and Art. Music Makers Hacklab brought together 20 international sound artists, inventors, technologists, artists and musicians for one week to create new musical performances, instruments and concepts to be performed live at the end of the festival; ‘Emotional Invention’ at Hau2, Kreuzberg. The programme was led by Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music and hosted by Native Instruments.
The week was a mixture of fascinating talks on software building (Reaktor blocks), physical instrument design, graphical notation. For Noise Orchestra it was the first time we had tested the Noise Machines as collaborative instruments and within a live performance context. Vicky worked with two artists, Mateusz Radz (Poland) and Pyotr Modesti (US) to create a new composition reflecting the theme of the festival Fear, Anger, Love. I was interested in the concept of the human and the machine and keen to explore and collaborate with ways of getting human emotion into a machine and performing from within the circuitry.
My collaborators worked with turntables, live instruments, music production software and our final piece took raw tones known to induce certain emotional states such as 528Hz (love frequency). We created a series of sonic movements to take the audience on an emotional journey and worked with samples and found sounds and live improvisation in the final performance. It was a good test to work with electronics and other timbres/instruments/musicians in live performance to investigate mixing, eq and playability. Here’s a video about the project featuring Vicky and the machines.
Waves Around Edges is a live response to the Delia Derbyshire archive housed at 
I visited 
These samples formed a both a sequenced section of the performance and inspired the Tape Machine Sculpture I created for the show. The sculpture was a sonified object made of found materials, with heavy steel sections salvaged from a Salford building site. I selected the top piece due its look of a sine wave, the bow i used to play the sculpture had magnetic tape running along the length and I embedded a cassette head within the object for some rewind/fast forward action.
Other composed sounds within the set looked at sound as material including electromagnetic recordings , I wanted to get a sense of electricity, disorientating FM synthesis and also authoritarian educational BBC voices discussing the nature of sound, electricity and magnetic tape to reflect the male dominated world in which Delia worked at that time.
VICKY CLARKE 