[Glastonbury] FAVE report

[tim hall]

 Just a quick report to say we held our FAVE gathering at the Trinity
centre in Bristol on Saturday. It was most successful. I would like to 
apologise to the fair number of people I failed to get back to and the lack 
of streaming. It's the first event we've actually put on ourselves here and 
we have lots to learn.

I was most impressed with the amount of information our speakers managed to 
fit in to their 30 minute slots. Chris O'shea started us off with an 
intriguing glimpse into tangible interfaces for audio visual environments. 
Tom chance from Remix Reading gave a lightning overview of libre licensing 
and the possibilities of co-creativity. John Ffitch gave us a short form 
intro to Csound and Michael Sparks introduced the BBC's open source network 
testing platform called Kamaelia. That was just the morning session.

After lunch Rich Bown gave us a quick tour of Rosegarden followed by an 
inspirational testimony from James Wallbank about the ways in which Access 
Space in Sheffield has promoted creativity using open-source software for 
over 5 years, through artist residencies, workshops, events and exhibitions. 
Plugincinema.com followed with an equally inspirational talk on web-film 
making and open-source cinema as an alternative to Hollywood. For our last 
presentation, RachelAPP demonstrated how to record and mix a track using 
Ardour, how to program drums on Hydrogen and how to master the final track 
using JaMin from a refreshingly non-technical perspective.
 
We rounded off the day with musical performances from Andy Preston, RachelAPP, 
Matt Gray, Jonny Stutters and Dave Griffiths. Dave's highly visual live 
coding style was particularly fascinating to watch as well as listen.

It was a very full day as you can see. It provided us with a great chance to 
do some local networking and most importantly we achieved what we set out to 
do and covered costs without any external funding. I think everyone came away 
feeling very inspired and it seems like we have done a good pilot for an Open 
Source Audio and Video users' event, which has every chance of continuing and 
growing. You lot missed a great event.

cheers,

tim hall
http://glastonburymusic.org.uk/tim