Apps
Release – In Your Own Time Part #3
This is the third in a series of post rounding out my experience of putting out In Your Own Time in April 2013. The previous posts covered the inspiration behind the project and putting it together as an app. This post will talk about putting the app out into the world and what that has meant for me.
Release & Press
The release date for the app was April 2nd and in advance of that I sent out some press releases to magazines and blog who I thought might be interested. There wasn’t an immediate take up on the idea. It had a summary write up in Noise in the first week. It also got a tweet from Harmless Noise. Largely though, initially at least, the response was a bit disappointing. Read more
Pre-release – In Your Own Time Part #2
This post follows on from a previous post about the inspiration behind In Your Own Time. In this post I talk about taking the prototype that I created for my thesis and recruiting people who could help turn that idea into a reality. Read more
Inspiration – In Your Own Time Part #1
The length of the initial post was starting to get a bit out of hand so I’ve separated it out into two posts. This one contains the backstory of the app: the inspiration behind it and how it came into being as a masters project. The second post is about what happened when the app went out into the world. What worked, what didn’t, the ups and downs of putting something out, and the lessons I learned along the way.
It’s been a little over a year since I, along with the help of Shane Finan and Mick Cody, released In Your Own Time. The app has now been downloaded over 1000 times in over 20 countries and has been a massive step for me both personally and artistically. I want to share the journey to date with you here. Read more
2013 – a look back on the year that was
The year of Our Lord 2013 is almost over and at least 2013 things have happened to me this year, but rather than list them all here is an abridged summary. Lots of travelling, meeting new people and hearing interesting things in interesting places with interesting people.
Learning
This year was a pretty hectic in terms of education. I’m out of my masters a little over 18 months and I’ve been trying to continue to learn as much I can. I’ve been luck enough to get the opportunity to study on a number of courses, both in Ireland and internationally. The first was the Young Composers’ Meeting in Apeldoorn. This was a pretty terrifying experience as I got to write for a 16 piece ensemble with voice. Most of the instruments were ones which I had never written for before, and I wrote the piece as we drift softly (into the fog) for the course. Read more
MusicTechFest 2013 – My experience
I’m just back from presenting at MusicTechFest. It was my first chance to talk to people outside Ireland about In Your Own Time and was a pretty daunting and exhilerating experience. But I loved every minute of it. As well as presenting about my work I was also able to take it some of the other talks. Chat to people and immerse myself in the festival. I’m now very taken with MusicTechFest, it’s an excellent event.
In my day to day life I like meeting with entrepreneurs. Talking with them and hearing what motivates them can be a really energising experience. They’re always really interesting people, full of energy, optimism and a ‘Lets do it!’ attitude. But there’s always a difference what we’re ultimately interested in. What you get at MusicTechFest is that same kind of enthusiasm, passion and excitement singularly focused on music. Read more
In Your Own Time at MusicTechFest
I’ve been following Andrew Dubber on Twitter for a while. He’s a pretty prolific social media user with lots of interesting ideas about everything but I’m mostly interested in his writings on the music industry. To cut a long story short I saw that he is heading to MusicTechFest in London this month. I had a look at the website and immediately got super jealous. There’s going to be an amazing lineup at the festival from lots of different aspects of the music technology. I spent a while drooling over the website and playing with their html sequencer, but then had to get on with my life and put it out of my mind. A few days ago though I got an email asking me if I’d like to give a talk about In Your Own Time, I was over the moon!
First post of 2013
The year of our lord 2013 is upon us and in spite of the people’s misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar we’re still here. There’s some exciting stuff happening this year and I’ve decided to start the year as I mean to continue, with a to-do list–masquerading as a blog post. A couple of website announcements first, you might have noticed that my domain name has changed. No longer am I davidbcollier.com, 2013 means the shiny new domain of davidcollier.ie (I felt the ‘b’ was holding me back) and a little update to the look of the site. Any links to the old site will redirect to this one, so no worries there. As well as that I want to announce that the website for the app In Your Own Time–which I’ve been working on over the last year–is now live! The app isn’t out yet but the website is there to give an idea of what to expect when it is released in March. You can stay up to date with it’s progress on Facebook and Twitter. Read more
The Creative Coding Podcast
I’ve been listening to this podcast for about a year now. I first got into it when I started learning Processing, as they had some great interviews with code artists and digital creatives like Daniel Shiffman, Ben Fry and Golan Levin, who are heavily involved in the Processing community. The two hosts, Seb Lee-Delise and Iain Lobb, are very entertaining and there’s some great chat about being a creative programmer and discussion of the ins-and-outs of freelancing. The interviewees are always really interesting people doing interesting things, normally people at the top of their game in their field and I’ve found myself being exposed to lots of different, interesting projects through the show. It’s probably not for the non-coders, but definitely worth a listen if you’re interested in doing creative things with code. Here’s a show they did with the artist Kyle McDonald about being investigated by the Secret Service for an art work in an Apple store, as a taster.
Brendan O’Driscoll from Soundwave
Earlier in the year I went to Music 3.0 a week long seminar on the future of the music industry. The week was a barrage of talks from interesting people doing interesting things and one of the talks that really struck me was given by Brendan O’Driscoll and Craig Watson. They were speaking about their company Soundwave, which is creating a way to find out, in real-time, what songs people are listening to. I got in touch with Brendan to find out more.
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How did Soundwave get started?
I started Soundwave with my cousin Aidan Sliney in November of last year. We applied for Launch Pad 4 with a completely different idea in July and got some really good feedback that was very motivating. We sat down and said ʻwe didnʼt get in this time but weʼre going to learn from this, take all the lessons, all the pointers and the comments and apply it to a brand new idea.ʼ So we just started brainstorming ideas. Read more