Update on: “Cultivating digital music making in regional Australia” (Bennett, Brown, Ferguson, Strong, Green) is an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (ARCDP240100682, total project value: $434,752). The fieldwork is nearing completion, and we are targeting 10+ journal articles and an edited collection. The images below were captured in South Australia at Sauerbier House, Port Noarlunga, where a workshop on the LoFi Grannulator (designed in collaboration with Andrew Brown) was delivered by research assistant Tara Pattenden and me. This workshop brought together participants from the Fleurieu Peninsula and Mount Barker and followed up with a performance at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE) the next day.
A selected overview of practical activities to date is below, alongside some advertising:
- July 2026: “From DIY electronic instruments in regional Australia to new audiovisual worlds” is a new work by John Ferguson, Tara Pattenden, Andrew Brown that will be presented at Casa Comum in Porto, Portugal as part of https://www.kismifconference.com. This uses all instruments and code developed for this project to date and intertwines imagery and video from the design and build process into an interactive and experimental form.
- April 2026: instrument building workshops, performances, and mentoring at Southern Lights Festival in Bega Valley (NSW), which received support from Creative Australia (yeah!). https://www.nsw.gov.au/visiting-and-exploring-nsw/nsw-events/southern-lights-festival.
- January 2026: Low-Fi Granulator workshop at Sauerbier House, Port Noarlunga SA 5167; participant performances at Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE).
- November 2025: Practical workshops and performances with the newly created LoFi Generative Sequencer in Bendigo and Castlemaine (Victoria); Additional presentation in Victoria at RMIT on the ARC project and of the LoFi Generative Sequencer and the New “Beat Machine II” at MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studios);
- April 2025: Practical workshops and performances with newly created LoFi Sampler as part of “Brave New Works” in Denmark (Western Australia);
- November 2024/January 2025: Build a Drone synth workshop and follow up DIY show and tell at Sippy Downs, QLD.
