Aldeburgh
x = independently organized TED event

This event occurred on
November 6, 2010
Woodbridge
United Kingdom

Chaired by Suffolk based, TED Music Director Thomas Dolby, the day will feature sessions on three different subjects: Perspectives, Play and Participation. Tod Machover, David Toop and United Visual Artists, with recorded talks from David Byrne and Mark Johnson. William Orbit, Louis Lortie and Nick Ryan present their thoughts on Play in a session which also includes recorded talks by Evelyn Glennie and Benjamin Zander. For the ...Participation session, Tim Exile and Imogen Heap give their insights live at Snape alongside recorded talks by Derek Sivers and Itay Talgam. The day will also include live performances from Louie Lortie and Peter Gregson as well as coinciding with Aldeburgh’s New Music New Media course also presenting on the day. This is an unparalleled opportunity to gather in one place the great minds and explorers of contemporary music. Don’t miss it.

Woodbridge
United Kingdom
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Speakers

Speakers may not be confirmed. Check event website for more information.

David Toop

David Toop (born 5 May 1949) is an English musician and author, and as of 2001 was visiting Research Fellow in the Media School at London College of Communication. He was notably a member of The Flying Lizards. He was a prominent contributor to the British magazine The Face. He is a regular contributor to The Wire, the U.K. based music magazine. Toop published his pioneering book on hip hop, Rap Attack, in 1984. Eleven years later, Ocean of Sound appeared, described as Toop’s “poetic survey of contemporary musical life from Debussy through Ambient, Techno, and drum ‘n’ bass.” Since the 1970s, Toop has also been a significant presence on the British experimental and improvised music scene, collaborating with Max Eastley, Brian Eno, Scanner, and others. In 2001, Toop curated the sound art exhibition Sonic Boom, and the following year, he curated a 2-CD collection entitled Not Necessarily Enough English Music: A Collection of Experimental Music from Great Britain, 1960-1977.

Imogen Heap

Born 9 December 1977 in London is a Grammy Award winning British singer and songwriter. A Grammy nominated multi-instrumentalist, who began writing music by her 13th birthday (and broke America by her 28th), an innovative singer-songwriter with a quirky and inspirational character, a tech savvy musician with an eccentric sense of style and uniquely graceful music, Imogen Heap is a profoundly English artist whose songs transcend time and place to conjure captivating digital dreamscapes of love, loss and hopefulness. Imogen’s distinct, eclectronic-style, a brilliant kaleidoscopic symphony of voices, beats, sounds and emotions – mixing beautiful lyrics with breathtaking melodies, traditional instrumentation with computers, to create a sound that’s folk-hued and digital and sparks the imagination – has won her over 350,000 friends on MySpace and more than 250,000=followers on Twitter. Fans include Brian Eno, Jeff Beck and Scrubs star Zach Braff8, while US chat show hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno, Carson Daly and Hollywood mega blogger, Perez Hilton, have all championed her ability, musically and physically, to transfix. Imogen is, in all senses, an EXPERIENCE.

Martyn Ware

Born in 1956 in Sheffield, UK. After leaving school worked in computers for 3 years, in 1978 formed The Human League. Formed production company/label British Electric Foundation in 1980 and formed Heaven 17 the same year. Martyn has written, performed and produced two Human League, two BEF and nine Heaven 17 albums. As record producer and artist has featured on recordings totaling over 50 million sales worldwide - producing Tina Turner, Terence Trent D’Arby, Chaka Khan, Erasure, Marc Almond and Mavis Staples, etc. Etc. Founded Illustrious Co. Ltd. with Vince Clarke in 2000 to exploit the creative and commercial possibilities of their unique three-dimensional sound technology in collaboration with fine artists, the performing arts and corporate clients around the world. Martyn produces and presents a series of events entitled ‘Future Of Sound’ (21 so far) in UK and around the world and has created sonic architectural works at the British Pavilion at the Venice Architectural Biennale in 2006 amongst many others.

Nick Ryan

Nick Ryan is a composer and sound designer. He holds top industry awards in technical and creative fields for his unique approach to sound and music for film, TV Drama and Documentary, Interactive Media and Orchestral composition. In 21st April 2008, Nick won The PRS Foundation New Music Award 2008. Their project, The Fragmented Orchestra, will build a ‘living’ musical instrument, modeled on the firing behavior of neurons in the cortex of the human brain. Nicks first compositions involved interpreting Hussein Chalayan’s fashion garments into sound and music by studying their construction, texture, shape and narrative themes and creating sonic equivalents for each visual and textural component. This cross-media collaboration instigated Nicks continuing ambition to use composition to describe sensory stimuli such as touch, spatial perspective and colour and narrative through music and sound. Nicks subsequent collaborations as a composer and sound designer have been many and varied and have spanned diverse creative disciplines including motion graphics, animation and interactive media, orchestral ensemble as well as linear film, TV Drama, Documentary and Radio.

Peter Gregson

Born in Edinburgh in 1987, Peter Gregson is a cellist, composer and pioneer of contemporary music. He has performed widely in the UK and the US, at venues ranging from The Royal Albert Hall, London to The Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh; from the Twitter Offices in San Francisco to Le Poisson Rouge, New York. Peter’s innovative approach to integrating cutting edge technology and contemporary music has led to collaborations with Tod Machover, Microsoft Labs and many other developers, artists and composers, and invitations to speak and perform at technology and media conferences around the world. His work has been recognised with the 2008 Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for music and with membership to the Courvoisier Future 500. Peter is a Made-By ambassador and also the 2010/11 Creative in Residence at The Hospital Club, London, where he curates his year long series, alt_classical. He is currently working on his second original album with a release planned for early 2011.

Sarah Nicolls

Sarah Nicolls is a UK-based experimental pianist and inventor, in 2008 building her own piano to resolve the issue of how to get inside the piano more easily. Called the ‘Inside-out piano’, she has since been creating new pieces for the instrument with various additional pieces of technology such as her ‘Wii wheel’ and MIDI-controlled motors. Sarah also works with interactive technologies and last year developed a new piece with EMG sensors, written by Atau Tanaka (Culture Lab). In other academic partnerships, she has worked with Nick Gillian at SARC to begin developing a motion capture system of control at the piano and with Pierre Alexandre Tremblay (University of Huddersfield) to create a half-hour interactive piece using the PianoBar. Sarah also continues with her busy concert career, giving recent world premieres such as Larry Goves’ Piano Concerto and Richard Barrett’s Mesoptamia, both with the London Sinfonietta. She is regularly broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and has recently written an article on Improvising with live electronics for the Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ20).

Tim Exile

Tim Exile is the recording alias of Tim Shaw, a producer, programmer and performer of electronic music. He is signed to Warp Records and known for his innovative improvised live sets on an international scale. Frequent collaborator of Native Instruments with whom he has developed the software package The Finger. A unique explorer of software design and programming and a new form of composition, Tim will be presenting a talk on his personal take on active music, touching on active music products and active music performances.

Tod Machover

Tod Machover (b. 1953 in New York) has been called “America’s most wired composer” by the Los Angeles Times. He is widely recognized as one of the most significant and innovative composers of his generation, and is also celebrated for inventing new technology for music, including Hyperinstruments which he launched in 1986. Machover studied with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions at The Juilliard School and was the first Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris. He has been Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab (Cambridge, USA) since it was founded in 1985, and is Director of the Lab’s Hyperinstruments and Opera of the Future Groups. Since 2006, Machover has also been Visiting Professor of Composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Ash Nehru

Founding director of UVA. UVA are a British-based collective whose current practice spans permanent architectural installation, live performance and responsive installation. Research and development is a core part of their process – enabling us to constantly explore new fields, as well as re-examining more established ones. They aim to work on a diverse and expanding range of projects. They have provided live visuals for Massive Attack, Kylie, U2, Jay-Z and are constantly pushing the boundaries of what the relationship between live music and visuals should be about.

William Orbit

William Orbit (born William Mark Wainwright, 15 December 1956) is an English musician, composer and record producer, perhaps best known to most for his work on Madonna’s album Ray of Light. Orbit was born in Shoreditch, London. In addition to being a producer, Orbit is also a composer and multi-instrumentalist who has specialised in keyboard electronica. Much of his work also features accomplished guitar and bass guitar playing. He has also recorded several largely instrumental solo albums on I.R.S. No Speak under the name Strange Cargo which features vocals by Beth Orton, Laurie Mayer and Joe Frank, among others. ” Orbit also produced a version of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (the original version of which was used as the main theme of the soundtrack to Platoon). “Adagio” was lifted from the album Pieces in a Modern Style a compilation of classical re-workings. The 4 May 2009 saw Orbit’s return with a new album, My Oracle Lives Uptown. He often DJs at various locations. Orbit lives in North London and Los Angeles and has his office and studio in Hoxton Square, London. He is currently working with Katie Melua and is producing her fourth album.

Organizing team

Thomas
Dolby

Woodbridge, United Kingdom
Organizer

Joana
Seguro

London, United Kingdom
Co-organizer