The 2nd Pure Data Mini-Con took place over two days, in the Boydell Room at Trinity College Dublin. Founded by Richard Duckworth (host, MC and Mixmeister!) in 2011, this event has quietly established itself as an important fixture in the Irish sound art calendar, specifically for those composers who use Pure Data software.

This year’s invited composers were a mixture of academics, students and performers who use Pure Data to teach, compose and perform sound art compositions. The line up included: Joao Pais +Endphase, Andy Farnell, Kerry Hagan, Softday, Ricky Graham, Andy McGovern, Richard Duckworth and Dave Collier.

The first day of the conference began with a series of papers from students and lecturers from various institutions across Europe. Highlights included Dublin-based composer, David Collier, who gave an engaging paper on the impact of Pure Data and mobile sensors on music composition. Andy Farnell  a computer scientist from the UK specialising in audio DSP and synthesis, and author of “Designing Sound”, gave the “keynote” address of the afternoon. This led to some very interesting discussions and searching questions concerning generative systems for music composition,.
Later the same evening composers presented a series of very contrasting live concert performances with Pure Data at the core of each event.
Rich Duckworth gave a thought-provoking microtonal performance with augmented controllers; encouraging the development of ideas concerning real-time modulation between tuning systems.
Lecturer and composer, Kerry Hagan from Limerick performed a contrasting noise-based piece in quadraphonic sound completely synthesized in Pure Data.
Musician Ricky Graham performed an improvisation in quadraphonic sound with a stripped-down version of Pd2Live (Pd2Lite) and accompanying interactive video programmed in GEM. Video excerpt of live concert.
Softday (Mikael Fernstrom and Sean Taylor) presented ‘In a not so Silent Way’, a mash-up of various recorded and live sounds, inspired by the music of Miles Davis and using a series of accessible controllers interfaced with Pure Data.
Listen to audio track.

The conference continued on Saturday, May 12th, with Workshops led by Andrew McGovern and Andy Farnell, and concluded on Saturday evening with the annual Pd mini-Con social meet-up.

Further information on this event.

Joao Pais

Ricky Graham

Softday