Four Favorites From Sonar+D 2019
Alongside the talks and the Sonar360 Dome, there were countless stands with world leading tech innovations on show at Sonar+D. Here’s a pick of our four favorites.
Probably the most interesting part of Sonar+D was wandering around the many stalls where leading tech companies came to flog their cutting-edge wares. Well, not so much flog as show off, I suppose. For you would have to have quite the wallet to buy most of the stuff being displayed, such was the astounding level of all things on show.
The stalls were sectioned into different “hubs”: audio tech, creative tech, immersive tech, among others. I spent three-and-a-half days sauntering around from stall to stall, mind-boggled by the innovations I came across, each more impressive than the last. After much deliberation, here are my four favorite things...
1. Costaflores Vineyard
Wine, cryptocurrency and an analog synthesizer. It sounds like the start to a particularly techy joke, doesn’t it? Either that, or an odd night which involves a little too much of the former, a reckless spending of the thing in the middle, and ending up, probably unbeknownst, with the latter. But these three seemingly antithetical things are bound together by the Mendoza based Costaflores vineyard, whose stall I visited at Sonar+D. But this is no ordinary vineyard: Costaflores has two tech-focused projects related to its organic grapes that combine wine with music and tech in the most delightfully unexpected ways.
My interest in this stall was sparked by its owner, Mike Barrow, a US born IT technician now based in Mendoza, who stood sampling his product amid a throng of wires, bleeps and flickering lights. I was intrigued as to what his glass of wine could have to do with the intimidatingly large Antonus 2600 synthesizer he stood next to; wine and a dense web of electrified cables don’t feel like two things that should ever really mix. We got chatting and Mike took me back to the start, to what the vineyard is all about, and his big ideas behind it.
All of Costaflores’ bottles of strictly organic wine are sold as “crypto assets,” he told me. This means that you can only buy them online using cryptocurrency, that new frontier of internet economics. Selling them like this is part of Mike’s “Openvino” project, which he hopes will bring “extreme transparency” to his business, with all accounting, pricing and growing statistics accessible and visible to his customers. As such, Costaflores is the world’s first open source winery, harnessing all the benefits of the blockchain space—the online peer-to-peer record of data upon which cryptocurrencies run—to shake up traditional business models of the wine industry. Once you buy an online “crypto token” for a bottle of the delicious Costaflores 2018 MTB Vintage, you get a share in the company—“You drink it, you own it,” as Mike puts it.
You’re probably wondering where the synthesizer fits into all of this; if the crypto element to Costaflores is all business, then the synth is the vineyard’s artistic side. As part of Costaflores’ extreme transparency model, a number of IOT (Internet of Things) censors are dotted around the vineyard, measuring everything from soil pH to air temperature, which are displayed online for all to see. Mike uses this data as the basis for what he calls Vinophonics,” the project that binds wine, IOT and the synthesizer. The raw data from the IOT censors is input into the synthesizer and interpreted as a variety of live, changeable feeds based on data from the grapes. These are then converted into frequencies on the synth’s interface. You can then fiddle with the synth’s oscillators, filters and arpeggiators to alter the sound and create different rhythms and musical motifs. I heard this first hand, as Mike made spiraling melodies dance from the synth which changed and evolved in real time based on the data it was getting live from Mendoza.
Openvino and Vinophonics are fascinating projects: at first seemingly gratuitous, but weirdly compelling. Mike also has a number of plans for the future of Costaflores—his ambition and passion for random oddities related to wine seem to know no bounds.
2. Kickstarter
Kickstarter’s booth at Sonar+D comprised some of the entire event’s most beautiful, but least practical, products. Not that the latter of these characteristics should be viewed as a criticism, far from it. After toying with countless high-end audio tech devices—twiddling knobs and prodding at faders—indulging in the whims of artists creating groundbreaking tech for tech’s sake was really rather fun.
Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform that helps startups source funds for their innovations from the public. The pieces on show at Sonar+D where very much part of the event’s ethos: cutting-edge tech and art together in harmony. My favorite thing they had on show was a funny little tool called Specdrums, a pair of light sensitive rings that recognize different colors and turn them into music when they interact with them. This was tangible, real-life synaesthesia, and a lot of fun to play with. I was able to tap on a custom-made, rainbow-colored pad and the rings would recognize the colors and play a sound based on each. But it didn’t stop there: you could also tap an orange, an apple, even a can of soda, and sound would erupt through the headphones (they work on anything colored). The Specdrums website seems to be marketing them as educational tools, and while I can’t think of any practical use for them, the technology going into the rings was seriously impressive.
Other Kickstarter backed products included Jeff Leiberman’s “Slow Dance”: a mesmeric machine that turned a pair of feathers into slow motion sculptures by hooking them up to two magnets and some sort of strobe light. It looked great stood next to the appropriately titled MOON, a lunar globe sculpture best described as a bedside lamp-cum … well, I’m not sure what else you would use it for. It boasts that it is the world’s most accurate lunar globe, rendering the moon’s precise topography using NASA approved data. Like the rest of the Kickstarter products—another was essentially a robotic one-man-band (a la Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins) hooked up to an iPad—it looked cool, and was something you’d really want, but certainly don’t need: worthy gifts for the design lover who has everything.
3. Barcelona Supercomputing Center
Moving straight from the lighthearted fun of the Kickstarter booth to the stall run by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) was perhaps an oversight; the gear switch from a robot playing the xylophone to a 20 minute chat about quantum computing was a big step up.
The lovely researcher from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain’s national hub and one of Europe’s leading spots for the industry, opened by asking whether I knew anything about quantum theory more generally. “Oh yeah, of course!” I lied, without missing a beat (my knowledge of quantum-anything extends to “something to do with the stuff going on within atoms” and that quite terrible James Bond film). Seeing that I was probably being a little disingenuous, she then began to explain the basic ins and outs of quantum physics and its new relationship with computing, kindly putting up with my constant nodding and very rudimentary questions. However, even if, like me, you are flagrantly ignorant about this kind of high-end physics, it’s not hard to see that the work they are doing at BSC is going to define the future of technology. For the next 20 minutes I stood gobsmacked as the researcher revealed the astoundingly complex but utterly fascinating parameters of what is surely the next frontier for physics and computing, bizarre and breathtaking in equal measure.
Quantum computing, she explained, doesn’t rely on binary numbers to encode information as conventional computing does. By harnessing the power of quantum physics—which describes the relationships between nanoscopic subatomic particles—quantum computing is able to break free from the constraints of the comparatively 2D world of conventional binary computing, instead working on a quantum interface which appears as if on a 3D, spherical plane. They had an experiment to visualize this, demonstrating how it works on practical level. Atoms are supercooled and passed through microwave signals and other vastly complex operations, and then from these experiments, BSC is able to analyze the subatomic process and turn them into hugely powerful digital software.
Quantum computing, the researcher told me, is only in its very early stages: no one has found a way to fully harness its full potential just yet. But its benefits to the world of computing are sure to be astronomical, especially in sectors like chemistry, cryptography and material science, where it will optimize digital processes and solve problems currently beyond the scope of even the world’s largest supercomputers.
(If you want to learn a bit more about it—perhaps from someone with a firmer grasp on all things nanoscopic—then do head to the Barcelona Supercomputing Website.)
4. ESCAC Virtual Reality
If you’ve read my other reviews of this year’s Sonar+D, you’ll see that both augmented and virtual reality were the main themes. The techiest tech heads and slightly lost punters from Sonar-proper could be seen all over the Gran Fira conference hall delighting in devices that can warp our current view of the world, or transport us to another one.
Virtual reality headsets—the main conduit for VR and AR—are now creeping into the mainstream, found not only in Silicon Valley or conference halls but in homes too. The Immersive Hub at Sonar+D showcased the industry leading versions of these, and there you could pop on a headset and be immediately transported into stunningly detailed VR worlds. One of these took you on an immersive journey through an Ayahuasca trip—thankfully without the infamous side effects—while another put you in the center of a crowd, full of strange, floating people who subverted your very notion of individual identity.
However, for creation on a budget, and for its charming, relatable story, my favorite VR piece of the week came from ESCAC, one of Catalunya’s leading film schools, participating in the program as part of the Universities Hub.
ESCAC’s VR curated experience was an interactive game called “Sound of Rain” that followed the life of a musician, and sought to explore how music had defined their experience of coming into adulthood. With headset on and headphones in, I was transported to a messy room not unlike my own in my teenage years, and had to grab at different instruments to pass on to the next part of a musician’s life, while sound directed the journey. Yes, it was more rudimentary than some of the top industry offerings, but as a student lead piece, with an interesting concept and passionate project leaders, it had to be my favorite.
You can see more of our reviews of this year’s Sonar+D here.
Read more about what was on show through the Sonar+D website, or watch the after movie for a real taste of the 2019 edition.
Harry Stott is a regular contributor to the Barcelona Metropolitan covering Brexit, local political and social issues as well as the music scene. He recently received a B.A. in music from the University of Leeds, and now writes and produces radio content for a number of organizations in Barcelona and beyond. You can read more of Harry's articles here.