After noticing the low number of female hackers at Music Hack Days, G.Hack troops Patrizia, Magda, Katerina and Nela decided to put together some fun activities for Sónar+D (Barcelona’s 21st International Festival of Advanced Music and New Media Art) festival including Learn to Hack Web Audio API with G.Hack workshop (to teach female attendees of some hacking skills and encourage them to participate in future Music Hack Days!) and Women Hackers panel with inspirational women founders, leaders, researchers and advocates of cyberfeminism, hacktivism, open culture and free tech education (more info and photos below!).
Workshop: Learn to Hack Web Audio API with G.Hack
In the workshop, participants will learn about the culture of software and hardware hacking through short demos and examples, before moving on to using Web Audio API straight through their web browser! The Web Audio API is a high-level JavaScript API for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. It includes capabilities found in modern game audio engines and some mixing, processing and filtering tasks found in modern desktop audio production applications. Participants will use this API to build simple synths and combine them with other musical feature extraction APIs to make some cool hacks! (The workshop is aimed at women beginners with no previous programming experience, though all levels are welcome).
Talk: Women Hackers
- Nela Brown, Chair of G.Hack
- Alex Haché, member of Dones Tech a group of Social Research dedicated to creating digital content, media production and communication. Haché is doctor of economy, cyberfeminist, hacktivist, developer of technopolitical projects, researcher of ICT for public good.
- Klau Kinki, part of Pechblenda LAB, an experimental laboratory where learning arises from raw experimentation and the self-formation where free knowledge emerges.
- Amélie Anglade, member of OpenTechSchool a movement aiming to offer free tech education. Co-founder of Hackership, a full-time 3-month hacker school programme located in Berlin and based on the values of OpenTechSchool. Her work focuses on supporting hackers of all backgrounds to learn and grow, and also she does music information retrieval and recommendation for a living. She presents herself as a music hacker at heart.
Nela Brown, Pechblenda LAB, Amélie Anglade & Alex Haché
G.Hack team brainstorming workshop structure at QMUL 🙂
Katerina and Magdalena discussing mathematical models and how best to teach the coding part of the workshop
Day before the workshop: Patricia, Magdalena and Katerina with G.Hack poster
G.Hack Sonar 2014 Workshop poster
Nela delivering Part 1 of the workshop ...
Magda helping participants resolve 'soundmap' issues 🙂
Workshop participants helping each other download all the 'tools'
Nela chairing Women Hackers panel with Alex Haché, Amélie Anglade, Julito and Klau Kinki
Nela, Magdalena and Patrizia celebrating the end of a loooooong day at Sonar 2014 with gazpacho soup and sangria (whilst Katerina continues hacking with the rest of QMUL troops at Sonar Music Hack Day 🙂