International Synth Design Hackathon

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Dear all,

I hope it’s ok to post this here. Admins, please correct me if I did this wrong

I am sending this email to invite your participation in an international academic synth design hackathon.

We are looking for 2-3 more academies to join this cross-disciplinary event. 6-8 academies will participate in total.

About the initiative

Official website - International Synth Design Hackathon

In the last two years, due to COVID-19, we saw a rise in academic teachers sharing their classes online, on YouTube, and on other platforms. These initiatives directly inspired this event.

Our goal is to connect designers, artists, and engineers from universities worldwide and challenge them to design human-centric instruments and sound art devices.

We hope to learn from one another, share knowledge and see how different academies approach the challenge in their own unique way.

Participating academies can be from music, engineering, design, or arts programs. Students can build performance instruments but also sound sculptures or interactive installations.

Date:
January 2022

Where:
Local event - Each academy hosts its local event in January 2022. The date is flexible so that coordinators can fit the event in between planned academic activities.

Online conference - In February 2022, we will have an online conference to share each academy’s highlight projects and meet everyone.

Challenge:
Design a human-centric instrument, sound-art device, or experience using given electronics within four days.

The kit:
To level the playing field, participants will use a similar kit of electronic components. Teachers from participating academies design the contents of the kits. Kits will cost no more than €80 each (kits are partially sponsored).

Fabrication:
Participants can use the academy’s workshops (CNC, laser, 3D, metal, wood, etc.)

Mentors:
Designers and engineers from the industry will participate as mentors throughout the event. They give lightning talks and brainstorm with students in allocated time slots.

For more information please email me at roey (at) synthux (.) academy

Roey Tsemah
Synthux Academy

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Sounds fun! I would potentially be interested to host one at ANU but Jan is summer holidays all the way down here in Australia.

What kind of kits are you thinking of putting together? DSP in hardware or just interfaces to software?

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Hey @charlesmartin

Thanks for the interest!

We are pretty flexible in terms of schedule. My students join between 1 - 4 of February. Princeton, for instance, have electives right after Christmas break so they host it on 4 - 8 of January.

The kits will include a microcontroller and a bunch of sensors. Our goal is to make it easy to code, but flexible enough for engineering students to have their fun too. We’re considering microcontrollers that allow both Arduino, Max, Pd and C++.

The focus is on hardware experiences. Although we are considering wifi transmitters as part of the sensors list so that students could use live data from the web/computer.

Ideally, participants can use the academy’s workshops for fabrication.

Let me know if you have more questions? Happy to hop on a call. Feel free to email me.

R

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