February workshops at Popsenteret in Oslo and the Corona virus’ effect on future workshops
The spring program for WoNoMute Oslo consists of seven workshops and the first ones were held at Popsenteret, Norway’s capital-based interactive museum of popular music.
Tejaswinee Kelkar held a workshop on live-coding in Gibber, a creative coding environment for audiovisual performance and composition. It contains features for audio synthesis and musical sequencing, 2d drawing, 3d scene construction and manipulation, and live-coding shaders. Ten participants came to join a fun and interesting lecture with Kelkar, working on making their own ideas into musical interactive pieces.
The week after Juno Jensen, aka Pieces of Juno, held a lecture where she shared her methods of working with the album series Kalopsia, Tacenda, Metanoia og Euthymia (The last one soon to be released). She presented her way connecting her work with philosophy and yoga during the process and shared her advices on how to work with music from ideas into a finished record, both with the music, visuals, live concepts and also with the label KOSO. It was a pure inspirational lecture and the participants stayed after the workshop, sharing ideas and challenges in their own processes.
The last workshop was held by Mari Lesteberg, who teached how to make a music-app in the programs Pure Data (PD) and MobMuPlat. PD was used to program music and sound, with digital effects, synths and sound installations. The visuals for the app was made in MobMuPlat Editor. After the workshop all participants had a new, self-made, music app on their phones. Mari has made some great tutorials for learning this at home, that you can find here:
Thanks a lot to Popsenteret for making the collaboration with WoNoMute possible.
What happens with the upcoming workshops at University of Oslo?
The next four workshops were intended to be arranged at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo. However, after the outbreak of the Corona virus (COVID-19) in Norway, all events at the University of Oslo have been canceled, currently until the 14th of April. That means that our two Reaper workshops with Jessica Sligter (12 and 13 March) and our Max workshop with Henrik the Artist (6 April) is affected. It might be that the Audacity workshop with Ane Bjerkan (4 May) also will be affected, but that we don’t know yet.
We will however try to arrange our workshops digitally via the Zoom.us platform. Zoom is a free video communication platform, similar to Skype, that has been used in teaching situations. WoNoMute has been using it in the seminar series, when we were streaming the seminars between Oslo and Trondheim, and also live online in our youtube channel. This means that you still can sign up to our workshops and be able to participate from home. You don’t need a webcam, but a headset (intentionally with a microphone if you want to be able to ask questions) would be useful.
The positive side of this is that now, geographically speaking, anyone can sign up to our upcoming workshops, not only the Oslo based participants. We still, however, want this to be a women/trans/non-binary only event.
The two first workshops with Jessica Sligter , have been postponed and will be arranged digitally in week 12, more information on which days and which time will come later. All participants are informed via e-mail.
We are of course sad that we won’t be able to arrange our events in a normal manner, but at the same time we are glad that the virus outbreak is taken seriously by the University of Oslo, and that they take extra cautiousness in this extraordinary situation.
