In another turn up for the books Sonic Sideshow ventured into arts and technology education this spring, facilitated by the Creative Partnership department at the Royal Opera House.
In collaboration with the arts department at Shenfield High School in Essex  we lead 16 'gifted and talented' 11year olds through the creation of their very own sonic suits. Starting with an introduction to Sci-fi design, and some ways people in the past have imagined our futures might look, the students went on to discuss their own visions of the future, and designed costumes based on those. They then used their suits to create short performance dialogues between their futuristic alter-egos using triggered samples as well as spoken word. Their pieces were performed both at their school concert and as part of a Creative Partnership conference at Royal Opera House  in Thurrock

The futures proposed by the kids ranged from the fabulous, dystopian or hopeful to the downright tech-fetishistic. Spurring conversations on the necessity or otherwise of money -the likelihood we would all end up living under ground due to environmental devastation, the possibility of touch screen-wind-up mechanisms (!) and whether more torture might save our crime problems!

In September the Sonic Sideshow joined the House of Fairytales’ Travelling Art Circus once again for The Mayor’s Thames Festival - we used junk, water and electricity to make a moist and marvellous racket! Our venue was a beautiful little red and yellow small-top tent stood in the park by Gabriel's Wharf, on the south bank. There we set up our interactive junk sculpture - the Musical Mayhem Machine - and a Waterwheel Powered Beat Sequencer newly built for the event. The Beat Sequencer operates on a similar principle to Daphne Oram's 'Oramics Machine' and looks like a Heath Robinson contraption for making a really good cup of tea! It was built to interactively demonstrate the principle of renewable energy harnessed from the water cycle, and the concept of cyclical beat patterns in music. To create beats the audience draws onto a disk of card which is then read by light sensors as it spins on the waterwheel powered turntable. I addition to our machines, the boys from Noisy Toys built an excellent contraption of see-saws and water-shoots that amplified the dripping and sloshing sounds using under-water microphones. All together we produced quite a din!

Over two days a seemingly endless stream of punters filed through our tent including school-children, teachers, parents, grandparents, intrigued passers-by and an inquisitive dog. Visitors contributed so many drawings to be processed by our machine that we had to continually send out for new pens. Divine intervention struck midway through the weekend with a visitation from an entire Hari Krishna Orchestra - now that’s what I call fusion!

Find more information about the Waterwheel Powered Beat Sequencer here.