This workshop uses handmade sensors as an experimental medium through which we can explore electronic music. Participants will learn how to make a sensor out of fiber and other soft materials which they can use to engage with electronic music. We will assign short readings for class discussion, and we will critically consider our physical and energetic relationship to sensors, instruments, and our expectations of interfaces and sonic output. The sessions will also include hands-on instruction and experimentation–with the earlier sessions giving attention to technical details about sensors, Arduino, and Max/MSP, and the later sessions giving attention to exploration of the medium and mini-performances/sharings. Overall, Sonic Soft-Sensing looks to celebrate the messiness, unruliness, and imperfection of soft handmade electronics as a starting place for sonic experimentation and electro-magic. We will be using Zoom for this class.

This class takes place online.

Upon registration, students will receive access to online class meetings.

Sliding scale available for BIPOC students (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Contact Millie Kapp at [email protected] for more information.

Hannah Tardie is a sculptor, performer, and scholar who was born in Orange, California. She recently completed a graduate degree in electronic arts from New York University, where she was awarded the Red Burns Scholarship and a Tisch School of the Arts scholarship. She has been accepted to residencies like ChaNorth and Crit

NYC. Tardie’s work uses ritual to examine intimacy and gender within histories of electronics engineering, fabrication, and waste. She currently lives and works in Maine, teaching electronics and new media at the university level.

Erin Cuana, or Nire, is an interdisciplinary artist from Queens, NY, working in music/sound, performance, video and new media. She’s interested in blurring artistic practice, knowledge-sharing spaces and performance. She’s a recent graduate of NYU’s Tisch program, with a masters in electronic arts, where she explored relations of humans and nonhumans: organic and machinic, via an animist and mystical lens. She is a recipient of the Red Burns Scholarship, a SUNY Purchase Art+Design scholarship and a participant of the Red Bull Music Academy. Her work can be seen in: Dazed Magazine, NPR, Fader, Interview Magazine and XLR8R. She also works in the healing realm facilitating breathwork, therapeutic sound, and reiki sessions.

image credit: Ella Chung