Berlin Modular Music – Aesthetic Strategies for the Rabbit Hole

About

In extensive hands-on sessions with various modular hardware systems, participants (beginners to advanced) explore the challenges of modular synthesis. Aesthetic and technical aspects are also discussed in depth in lectures and during excursions.

This workshop combines artistic and scientific perspectives on modular synthesizers. In extensive hands-on sessions with various modular hardware systems, the participants explore fundamental phenomena and challenges of modular synthesis:

How are different sound-generating and sound-modulating modules connected to form a patch? How can multiple (sub)patches be combined to form complex voices? How do different sound phenomena interact with each other?

It is often a matter of finding a balance: on the one hand, you can create a high degree of complexity, where you deliberately lose sight of the big picture in order to allow for “happy accidents”; on the other hand, it often makes sense to focus on an aesthetic strategy and ask how the musical goal might be achieved more easily.

The practical exercises are intensively supervised by the two lecturers to achieve individual goals in line with the participants' varying levels of prior knowledge (beginners to advanced). To gain a deeper understanding, the aesthetic background of various traditions in the history of synthesizers will be explained in special lectures with demonstrations.

After the participants have gotten to know each other, they can form groups according to their musical interests in order to work on projects with several systems over a longer period of time. However, it is still possible to work alone or in pairs on just one system. Special excursions offer insights into various aspects of Berlin's modular scene

Course leader

Kim Feser & Jessica Kert

Fee info