More than 123 000 people attended Sonar in Barcelona this year, breaking the festival’s previous record of 115,000 in 2016.
We attended the festival mainly focused on the day time activities at Sonar+D, but some of our highlights were Bjork playing her creative DJ mix on Wednesday night! Then we spent Friday interviewing truly innovative people like Ally Lee, Dr Albert Barque Duran, Oceanic Global, and Tomasso Brezzi!
We also saw the amazing De La Soul manager Brandon Nixon interviewed by Molly Neuman from Kickstarter Music about their approach and philosophy and how they continue to pursue innovation in their career.
We enjoyed visiting the Startup Garden and talking with incredible projects such as CameraFi, the Android application for displaying and recording a video, Beeping, the new audio protocol based on ultrasounds only smartphones can hear, Nested, a workspace sharing initiative, and Playmoss, which allows users to create playlists from music that they hear on the internet. We also had the amazing opportunity to listen to Jessica Brillhart from Google talking about VR and managing creativity!
Another marvelous visual display was watching life drawing classes directed by artificial intelligence in a project called My Artificial Muse! We also learned about littleBits, a kit of open source electronic modules snapped together with magnets to easily create complex systems and encourage children and teenagers to explore their creativity.
Friday evening was a perfect sunset with brilliant old timers Fat Freddies Drop, then Saturday a visit back to see the DJ set from Joe Goddard, ex-keyboardist from Hot Chip, play his tunes, and Veronica Vasicka, American DJ and founder of Minimal Wave Record. Finally, Thundercat finished it off with his amazing multi-disciplinary guitar song style.
You can hear our podcast interview with some of the participants on Soundcloud @Peopleonthegrid and here’s the link or listen bellow.
