At a recent event, the Music Tech Fest in Boston, I took part in a 24-hour hackathon.
Ostensibly I was filming it for the show I present on, BBC Click. But as well as recording it for the programme, the experience and the people I met that weekend left a deep and lasting impression on me.
For the first time, I was surrounded by those who live comfortably in the centre of the Venn Diagram of Music and Technology – I found it to be an incredibly nourishing few days. I was able to talk openly about my synaesthesia and the very sensitive musical side of me that I don’t normally talk about during my day job. That’s since changed – this week’s show is all about Music Technology.
Plus I finally had the guts to do some live composition in front of people I hardly knew – and their response was incredibly positive, which led me down the path of putting live-composed piano music up on the web.
Each piece of music was recorded live, in just one take.
For years I spent a lot of time fixing every little thing in my compositions – a bit like proof-reading a book for spelling mistakes, but here I’ve deliberately left the mistakes in, this goes up completely untouched by anything – I don’t even record to a click track. And actually, it feels kind of exposed and fantastic all at once to send this out to the world.
LJ Rich 
I’d give my right arm to be able to play like that 😉 – I’ve always felt that to be able to improvise, or to be able to put one’s all emotionally into a fabulous (composed) piece of music would be incredibly liberating. Unfortunately I struggled to scrape a pass at grade 6 piano so I content myself with choral singing these days, but that too can be very rewarding, especially when the conductor does something special in performance that never happened in rehearsal.
This reminded me of Epiphany Music in Manchester, and their improvised sound portraits, also the King’s Chamber Orchestra who specialise in improvisation. You might care to take a look (Google is your friend!)