The Love Music Festival was a gigantic music festival for children all around Scotland that took place in November 2010. It was far too vast of a project to fully explain here – it involved loads of musicians from all over the world, coming to perform in venues all over Scotland especially for schoolchildren for two fantastic weeks. Over the months leading up to those concerts the schools were visited by a number of different music workshop leaders who introduced the students to the music and developed educational materials for teachers to use on their own.

Lucky Frame’s job in all of this was to take care of all of the digital, interactive, and multimedia side of the festival. We first developed two pieces of interactive software for students to use in their schools.

The Looper was modelled off of the Boss Loopstation that beatboxer Hobbit was using in his sets for the Festival, and featured a spectral analysis system which was used to explain how the Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu did their magic.

The Map Mixer was a completely original piece of software that combined a sound map with a composition system, allowing students to see sounds they had recorded appear on a map, and then combine those sounds together to turn them into music.

Both of these pieces of software were used in conjunction with a series of workshops run by Yann in schools around Scotland. You can read about his travels on his Festival Blog.

Finally, we also developed several interactive installations for use during the actual festival shows. These included:
– Map Mixer Live, which allowed a group of people to control sounds by moving around a room
– Color Cinema, in which a large group of kids were given colored pieces of paper, which they used to control music in real time