It gives me indescribable pride and joy to list my next event:
On Saturday May 13th I will be speaking about “archaeoacoustics” at the Stone Nest in Soho as part of “Mesh Live“, hosted by 4D Sound and the one and only Max Cooper. If you haven’t heard of it, Mesh is Max’s music label – all science nerds with PhDs in particle physics, mathematics and biology who make exquisite techno. As a friend put it: “Zoe, this is your tribe.”
I will be one of a dozen people – including Cooper, the brilliant women from Kinda Studios, ecological electro wonderkid Llyr, and many more – who will be chatting about “spatial sound”: how to design musical experiences for a 360 speaker setup (rather than the traditional 2D stereo format), and why it can make such a difference.
I’ll be chatting about how humans chose, designed and constructed ancient sites based on their acoustic properties – a fascinating new scientific field I wrote about last year for Off Magazine. Before we had electrically amplified sound – which, remember, is only a century old – humans had to rely on the natural features of a space to crank up the volume to broadcast their messages to the masses. Churches have vaulted ceilings for a reason.
We like to think that technological advancements make us more sophisticated – but more often than not, they actually make us uninspired and lazy, presuming we can rely on our phones to do our thinking for us. Remember when you could handle simple equations, spell correctly, or navigate around your city without constantly checking Google? Don’t listen to what your audiophile friends say when they rant about their £10k speakers: the ancients, with only, stone, rock and their imaginations, were the true sonic masters. We were sound engineers from the very beginning.
The event is sold out, but given that we still live in the era of COVID, you might be able to get a ticket at the last minute.
To be asked by Max – a true musical genius, with a PhD in computational genetics – to speak alongside him is so flattering it doesn’t even seem real. I adored his music before meeting him for the first time in 2021 – it was only when quickly skimming his bio prior to a pint that I realised he studied genetics for a decade. *Of course*, I thought. That explains why his music is so complex.
The only thing that inspires me more than music is the complexity of living things, so it’s nothing but an honour to work with people who appreciate both.