The Berlin Sprint is over and it was the biggest sprint we’ve had so far. About two dozen participants and the full RjDj team were taking the office of our wonderful hosts Moviepilot (check their website!) hostage for three days. Our goal was to produce more scenes for RjDj, give musicans a headstart in Scene writing and generally have a good time.

And we think we did: Each day we started around noon and kept patching, and discussing till late at night. On Saturday Frank Barknecht gave a Pd crash course for those musicians who had never before written an RjDj scene. In the end many wonderful scenes were submitted to the infamous Eurovisionary Scene Contest on Sunday, when we voted for the best scene.

The winner this time was: Martin Brinkmann from Bremen/Germany. He even managed to write three scenes in one weekend which all were very nice, relaxed ambient/techno sounds, that would react to movements of the iPod/iPhone. He also later played a cool little gig at the closing party.

Second place went to Amaury Hazan, whose “Strike” scene is a shaker and really a little hip hop symphony.

Georg Holzmann polished his Ping Pong game, put some more levels into it and managed to finish third in the scene contest with that.

Here’s a little overview of the other scenes that were planned and produced:

Martin Schied managed to create many crazy noises in his scene and also later showed off his Circuit bending skillz during our closing party at the FC Magnet Bar. (He didn’t bend All Our iPod Circuits thankfully ;)

Giuseppe Birardi did a prototype for a “scream scene”: You would be screaming at your iPod/iPhone and then be able to manipulate your scream in various ways.

Joao Pais worked on an interesting project for the austrian composer Peter Ablinger and transformed the iPhone into a frequency analyser including an additive synth tuned to the frequencies of the notes on a piano (optionally).

Nat Fowler came to the sprint with not much prior experience in Pd and still was able to create a rocking subbass scene that was literally heart-breaking.  (It especially impressed our visitor Jason Forrest/Donna Summer!)

Georg Bosch showed, what a Max/MSP-user can achieve after two days of working with Pd. His “Echo Chamber” scene did what its title promised: It beamed you into a huge echo chamber where even small noises would grow into huge monsters.

A different monster beast was the scene “hapticNOISE”  by Dieter Laser aka Jörg Brinkmann. While we @ RjDj try our best to fight the feedback between microphone and headphone, he’s a feedback addict and even provokes them.

Florian Waldner from Austria worked on his “Right Up Bass” scene which is very musical and has a jazzy, laid back feeling and would change chords and scales reacting to device movements.

Roman Haefeli is secretly building a successor to his famous “World Quantizer” scene. It’s still unnamed, but maybe you could call it “World Pitchizer”, because instead of incorporating percussive environment sounds, now he’s listening for pitched sounds and transforms them into choirs and string ensembles.  Very exciting, but so far unfinished …

And then we had Chris McCormick show his first scene which is a kind of automatic hiphop backing track generator. Just let it go and start rapping, and shake it if you go to the verse to get a new beat.