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A DeKalb music festival will allow participants to create their own tunes

Misspent Youth - Dave D K Kolars, Dale Ludwig, Mike Warfel
Burning Cicada Arts LTD.
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Burning Cicada Arts LTD.

Misspent Youth performing at a past Burning Cicada Arts and Music Picnic Festival.

A DeKalb sound company will give concertgoers an interactive experience during its upcoming music festival.

J. Byron Wise is the CEO of Burning Cicada, LTD. This organization provides sound restoration services, mobile recordings, and sound workshops. It also produces music festivals. Wise said the upcoming festival will offer workshops that incorporate different sound technologies. He describes one of the instruments.

“It's essentially a circuit board with magnets that have piano wires going through them very finely tuned,” Wise explained. “And what you see here is a mesh neoprene, so it's very soft, it's very spongy. But it's just very beautiful to play.”

He said participants can play with software that converts images into sound. Workshop participants will also be able to make music using a tool created by Monica Lim. Wise said this depends on weather conditions.

“It essentially uses a web camera, and it will track like an x, y coordinate,” he said. “You can apply those to different systems such that like, you can just move your hands and you’ll create music with that.

The Burning Cicada Arts and Music Picnic Festival will take place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday Sept. 23 at the Hopkins Park Bandshell in DeKalb. Renee Nanzer, Chaos A Chord, Alex Degroovia and Zoe and Nolan will perform.

Yvonne covers artistic, cultural, and spiritual expressions in the COVID-19 era. This could include how members of community cultural groups are finding creative and innovative ways to enrich their personal lives through these expressions individually and within the context of their larger communities. Boose is a recent graduate of the Illinois Media School and returns to journalism after a career in the corporate world.