Linux Audio Conference 2010
The conference about Open Source Software for music and sound
May 1-4 2010, Utrecht, the Netherlands
LECTURES / WORKSHOPS / EXHIBITION / CONCERTS / CLUBNIGHT

Frank Neumann's Image Gallery

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Just checked into the hotel and moved into my home for the next 5 days, first thing I noticed was that my TV is infact booting into Gentoo.
 As Marc had warned us, 29/30 of April everyone in the Netherlands is celebrating Queen Beatrix' birthday, and it would look something like this. Orange is THE color during these days.
 Finding each other for the pre-conference dinner wasn't difficult since Marc's people had prepared nice signs that also caught some non-LACers' interest.
Entrance to the italian restaurant was slightly delayed in order to give the waiters time to set the table. Looking up in the air is Lennart Poettering, main author of PulseAudio. To his left is Stefan Kost, of GStreamer fame. The other photographer up there is Fernando Lopez-Lezcano.
 As said, national colors are orange, and some of us dressed accordingly to not be easily recognized as tourists. Left is Marc, then Fernando and Albert Gräf. Herman Robak (sitting in the back, looking like he is wearing headphones) is in fact wearing active-noise reducation (ANR) headphones (at least so I was told).
 The registration desk at HKU is being set up on Saturday morning. As usual, in the pile of name tags there were some (mostly from Nigeria) who did not show up (surprise!)
Shot of the "collegezaal", the main conference room. This year Jörn decided to use fixed microphones to catch audience noise and questions instead of having someone pass around the microphone all the time (simply because we had no extra wireless microphones). It worked out quite well.
 Marc Groenewegen's first on-stage appearance to welcome everybody, explain the conference programme, site whereabouts etc.
 I once again used my little eeePC for uploading speaker's slides to the webpage, keeping contact with IRC participants etc.
The artistic-looking coffee lounge of the HKM was well attended at all times. Particularly at the lunch break on the first day, since the lunch was sponsored (=free!)
 Another shot of the coffee lounge area.
 Jörn and Herman doing their duty. This time, we had 3 HD cameras plus the video output from the speaker's laptop, so using the video mixer they could wipe/soft fade/split screen from 4 different video sources, which yielded a remarkably good quality of the video archive.
Artistic shot of the "online character" of the whole conference.
 Another artistic shot that I liked for its angle. Current speaker is Graham Wakefield (LuaAV).
 Dinner at a nice little "Pannekoeken" (pancake) restaurant. It was warm, it was humid, and it was horribly noisy due to everyone talking to everyone at the same time (see also next picture).
Yes, the noise level at the Pannekoeken restaurant was considerable - now you might understand why Herman wore those ANC headphones.
 Since it would have not been of use to shout something, Marc instead decided to paint a sign with the price tag for dinner.
 Marije Baalman's first performance during this year's LAC, presenting a SuperCollider-based live-coded composition at the SETUP venue.
IOhannes Zmoelnig with his live-coding piece shortly after Marije.
 Than took care of (besides many other things) the "composition competition".
 Like always, some speakers finish their presentation slides on the very last moment - in this case it's John Kacur from RedHat.
A very regular conference attendent, Yann Orlarey, giving some more explanations in reply to an audience question.
 Fernando Lopez-Lezcano, explaining how his "A Very Fractal Cat" composition (already performed in Parma last year, but having grown by several minutes since then) is working from a technical point of view.
 Rui Nuno Capela, author of QJackCtl, QTractor and many other "Q" tools, showcases his new baby, a Nokia N900 running his "QMidiNet" application (see http://qmidinet.sourceforge.net)
Lunch at the SETUP venue was prepared by their "inhabitants", for a very fair fee of 5 Euros.
 During the lunch break, there were small coding or software performances (Chuck, QuteSound and more).
 Fernando, slowly recovering from the 9-hour jetlag between California and Europe.
Andres Cabrera demonstrating QuteSound, a graphical frontend to CSound.
 Once more, Andres Cabrera at work.
 The "Future of LAC" roundtable which Jörn and Robin had proposed. Well attended, with several good opinions on where we could/should/should not go (e.g. do we want to open up to the "video" world?)
Another shot of the "Future of LAC" roundtable. The location for next year's LAC was NOT determined here, though - there were several "possible candidates", but no definitive proposals. Do YOU want to host the next LAC? Then contact us at lac@linuxaudio.org :-).
 Malte Steiner from Hamburg, Germany, doing a performance with his "Minicomputer" application (http://minicomputer.sourceforge.net/) at the Linux Sound Night @SJU.
 Again Malte Steiner. The SJU, where the sound night took place, offered 2 stages so that while one was used for a performance, the other could be set up for the next artist. That kept the audience in motion all the time :-).
The "Sound Night Olympic Games" is a live-coding experience where a referee (Marije Baalman) is collecting SuperCollider coding snippets from the contestants and can either pass these on to the "live" audio system, modify them or reject them...I hope this explanation is somewhat correct.
 The screen showing the coding snippets of the 3 participants and the host.
 Another shot of the Olympic Games.
The longest performance of this evening (around 45 minutes?), and (in my view) the most intensive one :-).
 The performance by Wanda and NovaDeViator was both sound/music, video and voice performance at the same time.
 Though their performance was appearing to be based on commercial software, someone (Marc?) assured me that Nova DeViator is really a fully opensource guy.
Among the tools Nova DeViator used, I spotted PureData here.
 Lovis was a rather acoustic band with some electronic influences here and there. Nice, relaxing music with a very moody background video projection.
 Instruments used by Lovis were piano, saxophon, vilion, Cello, guitar, xylophone and then some more (like a breath/mouth controller plugged into a..hmm..melodica? Can't remember.
Of course, laptops were also used in Lovis' performance.
 Here's Than, presenting the results of the "Composition Competition". Task was to take the oldest available audio recording in the world ("Au Claire de la Lune" by Edouard-Leon de Martinville, recorded in 1860) and create something new out of it. See http://www.firstsounds.org for the original sound material.
 Winner of of Composition Competition was Kawandeep Virdee with his piece called "Moment of Clarity", available at the LAC2010 homepage.
Sorry for not even remembering yuor names, guys. They assisted with technical issues, among other pressing the "Play" buttons at the right times. "Playboys" was a sick joke, yeah, sorry for that :-).
 The Sound Night slowly comes to an end, and Frank Barknecht decides to do a little somewhat-improvised performance with his iPhone running PD. He has to hold it up since taking it down will cause the application to stop (intentionally).
 Conference poster for the Sound Night, as it appeared outside the SJU.
Some camera-camera shot from the last conference day.
 Another camera-camera shor showing Raffaela Traniello wearing a shirt from last year's LAC in Parma. Who's gonna be next year's host?
 The customized mascot for the LAC.
Towards the end of the conference, Tarik Barri, a former student of Marc Groenewegen, is demonstrating his software "Versum". Since some people at the conference started disliking those laptops everywhere that show the "evil sign", this one was "disguised" a bit.
 Tarik Barri (http://tarikbarri.nl) during his demonstration. Check out the demo videos at his homepage - they're awesome! Being asked about open-sourcing that software, he felt like he first wants to earn some money with what he created, so we settled with the statement "once you have earned your first miilion with it, we'll get back to you about that open-source thingy".
 The audience during the Versum demo. It was nice to see that even after 4 days of conference program, so many folks had still stayed at the HKU.
A vague shot of what Tarik's "Versum" application looks like, from the controller's point of view. He is navigating through 3D with a space mouse (I think it was a "SpaceNavigator" from 3DConnexion).
 Time to thank everyone who helped for their involvements. This is Farida Ayojil from HKU, who took care of everything around the registration desk, paper work and who knows what else.
 The obligatory post-conference dinner. Albert Gräf suggested to pick something a little more sophisticated than a Burgerking, so we went to the Indonesian "Selamat Makan". Yes, this is a very dark picture, sorry for that.
And the food was good and plenty, and the wine was fine...and the price was "slightly surprising" for some of us. Paying 1044 Euros for 21 people is somewhat more than most had expected, but the food was really good and as such a nice ending for the conference. Quoting Malte Steiner: "The same happened last year in Parma. You are really expensive friends_". :-)
 
June 07 2010, Marc Groenewegen & Robin Gareus
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