Russell Davies' Interesting conference 2011


Leila Johnston of Hackers magazine asked if I could bring some stuff along, and so the modular synthesiser and pig were dragged out for a demonstration.

The band members of Nine Owl in a Baguette helped this happen, but tragically no video or audio survived the performance - please get in touch if you recorded anything!

Bunting, and people in the distance with electronic equipment



Initial twiddling



Synthesiser and pig



Nine Owls in a Baguette in full swing (next 3 photos taken by Roo Reynolds)



Patrick was worried about not facing the audience, and so came up with an excellent solution...





After we did our bit, Sarah Angliss played a wonderful theremin set, including "Willow's Song" from the Wicker Man soundtrack, one of my favourite film soundtracks of all time.

Later on Sarah brought her theremin and connected it up to the modular synthesiser for an impromptu lunchtime jam session. The theremin and the synth both work on a pre-MIDI system called "control voltage", and so we were able to use each theremin antennae to control three oscillators and three filters simultaneously, for loads of knob twiddling and hand waving fun!



Here I am playing the theremin, back to front, sortof like Keith Emerson playing the Hammond organ backwards, only not quite as good.



There were lots of other things going on during the day, but one particularly excellent one was physics teacher Alby Reid's demonstration of nuclear fission using 1000 mousetraps and 2000 ping pong balls.



Also the plasticine creature competition...



The pig still doesn't have a name! Here are some suggestions by the public:





Sarah's robotic head, Hugo, in transportation mode.



All musical material at Interesting 2011 dedicated to Martin the extraordinarily helpful taxi driver.


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