Earlier this year Manchester-based music charity Brighter Sound announced their latest venture, The Hexagon Experiment – a mind-altering series of six free ‘Friday night experiments’ featuring live music, conversations and original commissions from pioneering women at the forefront of music, art and science.
Inspired by the creativity that led to the discovery of the Nobel-Prize winning ‘wonder material’ graphene, The Hexagon Experiment took place over six weeks during the summer as part of The Great Exhibition of the North in Newcastle and brought together some of the North’s most exciting musicians and scientists for six free events every Friday.
From music made by robots with Haiku Salut, to a spectacular tribute for unsung heroine, Delia Derbyshire by Liverpool pop trio Stealing Sheep, each event consisted of a live performance and an in-conversation between women at the cutting edge of science and the creative arts.
The Hexagon Experiment also formed part of Brighter Sound’s ‘Both Sides Now’ initiative, a three-year programme to support, inspire and showcase women in music across the North of England, and featured a five day ‘Both Sides Now’ residency with Anna Meredith to showcase nine upcoming female and non-binary musicians from the North East at the final event, entitled Works In Progress, which saw the musicians create new pieces of music and visual art inspired by the idea of Micro/Macro.
Here at Sundae we are extremely passionate about working on content that breaks the mould and strives for diversity and gender parity in the media industry. Over the last 12 months we have actively followed and supported Brighter Sound’s work and when we were approached by the team to help publicise The Hexagon Experiment in the final lead up, we were absolutely delighted to help!
With a truly amazing cluster of musical talent on board such as Anna Meredith, Jane Weaver, Haiku Salut, Stealing Sheep, Sara Lowes and Afrodeutsche, and championing such a strong message for more diversity in the music industry, this was definitely a project we wanted to shine a light upon for Brighter Sound and the amazing artists they were showcasing.
As part of our strategy, we created a bespoke short lead publicity campaign based around the project’s individual events with an emphasis on the talent behind them and the ‘Both Sides Now’ campaign.
This resulted in impactful and meaningful coverage that engaged with the project and explored the wider issues and messages for Brighter Sound. We also collaborated successfully with the talent behind the project to land some amazing features including a music experiment spectacular with Drowned In Sound, a blog with Jane Weaver on Big Issue in the North and two fabulous opinion pieces with Stealing Sheep on CLASH magazine and Oh Comely.
Overall, The Hexagon Experiment was an amazing and thought provoking project to work on and Sundae delivered a great selection of online, print and broadcast coverage with a total overall reach of nearly 20 million people.
Further highlights include interviews with Jane Weaver and Anna Meredith on BBC Radio 6 Music and listings within i-D magazine, The Pool, Grazia, Metro, NARC and the i newspaper.
For further updates on The Hexagon Experiment and Brighter Sound, please visit their website here.
At Sundae we are extremely passionate about working on content that breaks the mould and strives for diversity and gender parity in the media industry.
