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Great sonorities are a result of great collaborations, and the concert held on Friday, 7 October 2022 at the Pre-College building at the College of Music, Mahidol University was especially sensational. College of Music, Mahidol University alongside its close partner from Singapore, the Lasalle College of the Arts, produced an amazing concert with musicians from both schools going wild improvising with each other, creating sounds that left the audience startled in admiration. They did not just touch the heavens with their synergy; they brought heaven straight down to Earth, and what a sound that made!  This concert was the result of a long-standing collaboration between the Music Technology Department of the College of Music and the Audio Production Program at Lasalle.

It all started with the meeting of a few like-minded individuals from the audio production heads at Lasalle and Mahidol at a SEADOM Congress (the Southeast Asian Directors of Music Association), which fostered a relationship that brought them to visit Mahidol four times. Justin Hegburg and Dirk Johan Stromberg are two highly skilled teachers in audio production at the Lasalle College of the Arts, and after their first meeting with some of the representatives of Mahidol during SEADOM, they mutually decided to come and share their knowledge and expertise in audio production with the College Music Technology Department’s young and budding audio engineers - putting together a workshop with the help of Ajarn. Chayut Jessadavaranon (Note). Aj. Chayut’s hospitality and organizing skills helped them to feel at ease and allowed them to focus on creating an amazing workshop.

While this is the fourth time that Justin and Dirk came to teach at Mahidol, it was the first time they brought with them audio production students from Lasalle as well. The workshop began on the 3rd of October and ended with the combined students putting on their concert with the aid of Dirk and Justin at the end of the workshop. The students gained valuable insights into audio production over the week, such as in the “Systems Workshop”, where they discussed many things, from the performance space being used to identifying strengths and weaknesses of the technical install systems.

The two students that came from Singapore Lasalle for the workshop, Collin Tan and Muhammad Arshad Bin Ahad, also took part in playing at the final concert of the workshop alongside Dirk and the other Mahidol Music students. Collin Tan took to triggering sounds using the devices around him while Muhammad came up with sick beatboxing music. Dirk, being a master improviser and brilliant music technologist, played an instrument that he had made by himself. The rest of the team included a keyboardist, guitarist, drummer, and two traditional Thai instrument players (a Thai Zither and Khene). After a good soundcheck, courtesy of the music tech team, the musicians were ready and set to produce music that is difficult to put into words. Spontaneous sounds joined together in synergy, just like this collaboration that the partnership between Lasalle and the College of Music had fostered. If this is just the beginning, we can’t wait to hear more of Justin and Dirk’s contributions to Mahidol's music technology department in the years to come.