WhyMCA Hack Reality 2 is a super geek italian event which was held in Milan on 25th of May 2013. Main topics for this year were Internet of things, automotive, mobile, smart cities, wearable devices, m-payment and domotics.
I was invited by the amazing WhyMCA team to give a workshop about the theme of Sound and its connections with the world of developers.
After some internal brainstorming as usual music came in help and the title for the session naturally came up: Sonic Youth for developers.
Sonic youth is one of my favorite bands from the 90s (I’m especially talking about the period of Daydream nation and Dirty albums) and I was very happy to show their logo and pictures in a talk for people who potentially never listened to their guitars scream as noisy as possible during a song (if you want to know waht I mean watch the video below).
Anyway the presentation was dedicated to show developers the big opportunities in different markets, if they are open to use Sound as a mean to augment the user experience in softwares and devices.
I proposed many inspiring case studies (commercial or experimental) from different fields (mobile, wearable, Internet of things, etc.) and showed the tools which developers can use to implement their ideas (frameworks, languages, engines, etc.).
Anyway I am a good guy and then I uploaded a shortened version of the presentation (without videos and sounds) you can see below.
The rest of the day was very interesting and I want to remember 3 things I like mostly: the stand of DQuid, a great solution for connecting mobile devices with many physical objects; the workshop on fabrics by Riccardo Marchesi and Michele Ruini, in which they presented the project Metwit, and, obviously, the crazy young guys touching and pressing the keyboards of their computers during the hackaton session (all the projects are here).
I also had the chance to know new people interested in the themes of the workshop and then see some friend working in other towns: Iubenda‘s founder Andrea Giannangelo and Stereomood‘s co-founders Maurizio and Eleonora, with whom I started a super session talking about semantic of music and potential connections with the blog sounDesign.
At the end I want to thank Italo Marconi and Paolo Sinelli, who gave me the chance to speak again about Sound, hoping that for the next time I will be able to play some noisy tune, in the real spirit of Sonic Youth.