If you’re anywhere near Manchester, England, you’ll want to clear your schedule for 20-23 July (and thereabouts). The upcoming Futuresonic festival has been all over my inbox, and it looks really cool, especially since it supplements the usual talks and presentations with some very useful free workshops:

Futuresonic: Social Technologies Summit

The keynote is by none other than Toshio Iwai, ElectroPlankton and Tenori-On creator and interactive designer we just can’t get enough of around here.

Then there are plenty of talks exploring the social aspects of digital music and interactive art, with Regine from We Make Money Not Art, the folks from laptop music circle Share here in NYC, and lots of other interesting characters.

I’m most jealous of the free workshops. As seen on the Pd mailing list and detailed over at Pixelsumo, they include sessions on gaming environments as audiovisual tools, physical computing, controlling sound with the open-source Blender game engine, and a DIY 8-bit synth.

I’m sure I’m not the only one jealous here, so please: if you are near Manchester, can you send us a full report on the workshops and events? Flickr pool, carrier pigeon, anything.