Biography

My practice includes music, computer programming, visuals, and sound design, I use self generative and self organising systems to create work.
I produce work by myself, collaboratively and in a group. I regularly perform solo and with other musicians.
Alongside commissions to create my own work, I frequently take on commissions from artists and companies to produce bespoke software and hardware for sound and visual installations.
I regularly give presentations of this work, lecture in MaxMSP at Higher Education institutions and deliver creative workshops to all levels of ability.

I co-founded  i am the mighty jungulator  with Nathan Hughes in 2001. As a band,  i am the mighty jungulator,  have had a fluid line up, which is worth research in itself. Some of the venues we have played include the ICA, Festival Hall, The Science Museum, the V&A and The Tate. In 2004  i am the mighty jungulator  won the Diesel-U-Music Award for best left-field electronic music act with, unbeknown to the judges, two self generative music tracks.

With Nathan, I developed the concept of the original Voyage into the Unknown, a boat-party journey to a secret location with live music, visuals and pyrotecnics. For the second Voyage into the Unknown a PRS new composers grant gave me the opportunity to develop the music of the jungulator band into a formidable live performance.

In 2006, the jungulator sound was pushed further still, using a power trio of guitar, bass and electronics, in response to a commission for a new 45 minute set for Joanna MacGregor’s prestigious Bath International Music Festival.

I have developed numerous works for synchronised multi-speaker systems. For the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, I produced an 8 channel sound remix of Shostakovich’s 6th sympony 15 minutes after the concert had finished, using samples taken from the live performance. The octophonic system I designed used shapes such as Communist stars and Nazi swastikas as patterns for repetitive audio pans. Other works I have created using a full octaphonic sound system include an original composition I made for a dance piece choreographed by Charlotte Hacker at the Arnolfini.

I am the mighty jungulator have represented Bristol twice at the Fete D’Europe in Bordeaux, including a memorable show with cardboard robot dancers in May 2008. Later that month the jungulator was invited to produce a cine concert with live music and narration, Hammerfest, for the Jean Vigo centre, Bordeaux, which later got its home town premier in Bristol at the Venn Festival 2008.

Collaborating with the artist Kathy Hinde I produced an original score for a childrens theatre piece, The Tell Woman, and have collaborated extensively on Kathy’s Piano Migrations project as a MaxMSP progammer, live performer and composer. Other notable collaborations included remixing Laura B and Bristol troubadour Jet Macdonald.
I have produced a soundtrack for BBC Wildlife on One and the jungulator appears on a two hour Resonace FM radio special.

I still record under the name  i am the mighty jungulator  and most of my output is available on bandcamp. Using my own self generative visual systems, i am the mighty jungulator have performed at Rotterdam Film festival, Port Elliot Literature Festival, Swindon Film Festival and was invited to be a keynote speaker at the National Film Education Council.

I started developing jungulator software in 1999, after being introduced to the MaxMSP programming language, via da2 Dartington summer school. I quickly developed an automatic beat cutter, as there wasn’t one available commercially at the time. I was then invited to demonstrate its live capabilities at the Sonic Arts Network festival in Norwich 2000, playing as an embryonic  i am the mighty jungulator, under the name of Socket with Jo Hyde and Nathan Hughes. Futher encouragement by Matt Rolagsky lead to solo gigs at Kings College, Cambridge and various gigs in arts venues around London.

On moving to Bristol in 2001, I starting my own business through a Young Entrepreneurs scheme which lead to futher development of the jungulator software, which enabled me to demostrate its capabilites as a self generative music engine resulting in a business award from UWE with office space in their business incubator. This lead to the jungulator software being taken up by NESTA Futurelab as a prototype teaching aid. The jungulator is a continually updated piece of software designed for live electronic music productions, and I regularly post the latest shareware version on my blogspot. Using the jungulator software as the engine, I have developed many other customised versions for artists for multiple uses.

As part of on-going research and development I am regularly invited to lecture or run workshops using jungulator software and other systems I have developed. Research into how to use these systems educationally and commercially has lead me into running successful educational workshops in conjunction with the Watershed Bristol, and designing bespoke educational software for the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Using the jungulator’s self generative functionality, I have created a collection of audio-visual pieces.
– Culture Crunch uses junk tv to produced a powerful ubermensch of the planet.
– glabber is a self generative webcrawler that makes music and visuals from the hot news topics on the internet.
– For Swindon Film Festival I produced a generative portrait of the city using clips collected through a series of workshops with the people of Swindon.

Visuals systems I have designed have been used by the jungulator band, the artist Kathy Hinde, and have been used as the basis of many succesful workshops with young people.
I had the honour of having my VJ software, “derek and norma olden” cover mounted on a quarter of a million copies of DJ magazine. I made self generative visual systems to produce International DJ Nick Warren’s tour DVD. I developed a system to render strikingly beautiful harmonographs and am constantly experimenting with visual systems that work in response to sound. I have created self generative text systems using markov chains, and an automatic conversation builder designed so two computers can chat to each other.

Installation work has involved working with clients such as Hewlett Packard, Sony and the BBC.
For the Philharmonia Orchestra I programmed and advised the build of, play orchestra, a 96 channel sound installation for outside the Festival Hall, London which attracted over a quarter of a million users. For the artist Jony Easterby I have programmed bespoke spatialisation software, which Mr Easterby kindly invited me to use and included me as a feature artist in Powerplant Liverpool, as part of the Capital of Culture festival. It was at Powerplant that I saw the Pyrophones, and asked it creators Nick Sales and Mark Anderson whether I could develop software for it, where the kindly took me up on my offer.