In this workshop we will demystify some of the processes surrounding live electronic music making. Led by electronic musician, improviser, and sound artist Lauren Sarah Hayes, participants will be guided through building low-cost, DIY electronic synths, and explore strategies for improvising using these new creations. Using techniques derived from embodied interaction, enactive approaches to music cognition, and improvisation traditions, the group will work together to playfully explore collaborative electronic music making. No musical or electronics experience is necessary.

Indexical’s workshops are presented with the support of the WHH Foundation.

Lauren Sarah Hayes

Lauren Sarah Hayes is a Scottish live electronics improviser and sound artist based in Tempe, AZ. Her music is a mix of experimental pop/techno/noise/free improvisation and has been described as ‘voracious’ and ‘exhilarating’. She is a sculptress of sound, manipulating, remixing, and bending voice, drum machines, analogue synths and self-built software live and physically. She is excited by what can happen in the vulnerable relationships between sound, space, and audience. The Wire described her 2016 album MANIPULATION (pan y rosas discos) as “skittering melodies and clip-clopping rhythms suggesting a mischievous intelligence emerging from this web of wires”. Her recent 2021 release Embrace (Superpang) was included in Bandcamp’s Best Experimental Music of February 2021. She is a member of the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Director-At-Large of the International Computer Music Association, and has published extensive scholarly writing on topics related to sound, haptics and touch, embodied and enactive music cognition, interdisciplinary improvisation, and site-responsive sonic art.