John Burton originally studied Painting at Norwich School of Art and Design. He graduated in 1998 and moved to London and began exploring the possibilities of recording and manipulating sound on an old computer he originally bought to write his Art School dissertation.

Since 2010 John has been busy designing, building, and developing his light controlled musical interface. The interface is a music performance system comprising a light sensitive controller and specialised software developed by John that is played gesturally using handheld lights and other light sources. The sounds produced are strongly related to the performer’s actions and are all produced in real-time to create an immersive audiovisual experience. He’s performed throughout Europe using the system and given talks and workshops with it at various Music and Art Schools.
In 2015 the interface won the Quartz Award for Innovation.
John is very interested in theatre, dance and poetry and in 2012 composed the music for Crow which was based on Ted Hughes poems of the same name. It was produced by Handspring, the puppetry company which became well known for its production of War Horse.
John is also a key member of Polar Bear, a twice Mercury Music Prize-nominated band based in London.

About the workshop:

The CD40106B CMOS Hex Schmitt-Trigger Inverter chip usually has a very dull life. It is often found tidying up the levels in the digital logic circuits. This is a tragic waste of a good chip and we will use this chip for something altogether more exciting. We'll be making a massive synthesiser out of a whole load of them....
 
In the workshop, participants will build a synthesiser based on the CD40106B. We’ll look at how to make simple oscillators on breadboard (no soldering required), examine how changing components can change different qualities of the sound. Finally we’ll make the oscillators light controlled and use the light created by each node to control the other nodes near it.  

The workshop is run by musician and maker Leafcutter John. Workshop language is english.
Age 14+
Participation fee: 30 RON.
Application deadline: September 10.

Maximum number of participants: 15
Time of workshop: 15. September 15:00 – 17:00
Location: Tamási Áron Theatre - The Club
Each participant takes away a working light synth.