Andrew Melchior and Robert Del Naja: Connecting music and technology.

During four days, Sónar+D turned Barcelona into the center of technology and sensorial experiences. 

Sónar+D, a Congress of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art, gathered over 4.600 creative industries professionals from more than 60 countries, who took part in at least 20 different workshops, giving them the opportunity to explore, dance and discover creativity in new ways. 

Sónar+D brings together leading artists, technologists, designers, thinkers, scientists, entrepreneurs, makers and hackers to inspire, facilitate and improve relationship between creativity, technology, innovation and business.

This year the common denominator was the ‘immersion’, which described most of the interactive facilities and augmented reality representations. 

One of the most striking proposals was “To the Moon”, an innovative virtual reality experience in which visitors could travel to the moon going to the past, and to a heartbreaking future in which the moon has become the rubbish dump of humans’ waste. Traverse X also standed out. In this activity, people could literally walk through sound and interact with objects and instruments. 

However, the most impressive proposal was the “Fulldome” (Mediapro Studio). Visitors could feel an incredible full immersive experience in which the displayed works of artists like María S.Leiva and Miguel Arrieta, filled the 19 meter-diameter dome, using water as the unifying thread. 

A 19m diameter fulldome for immersive audiovisual. Sonar360º by @GrupoMEDIAPRO features the premieres of seven audiovisual pieces curated by @sonarplusd #sonarD2019 #sonarfestival pic.twitter.com/bmbwfHLce7

— Sónar Festival (@SonarFestival) July 19, 2019

Another area explored at the Sónar+D, was the relationship between art and artificial intelligence, posing the question whether machines can create, and the possibility of artists contributing to science.

Looking into the aforementioned field, was the work “Deep meditations” from Memo Akten, a Turkish artist that explored the methods of the machine learning and deep learning in relation to nature and spirituality. The project aimed at reconstructing the history of the universe by using images of artificial neurons connections created by the artist. More than 100,000 images of human experiences with tags such as Big Bang, nature and landscape, etc. were used.

Sónar+D played host to more than 20,000 visitors, making this edition the best one so far according to its organizers.

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