Rebel against the anti-intellectual world around us! Forget the traumas of math classes past! Instead, enter a hypnotic trance as your screen vibrates and headphones ring with the sight and sound of Pi’s approximations. Our friends over at VDMX would like to introduce you to the wonders of … bad Pi.

“Chino Yoshio, a composer based quietly in Kyotanabe, Kyoto” has been working with sine waves in poetic, beautifully reflective ways. I’m going to run today with the idea that sine waves need not be just neutral, the absence of harmonics — not just a technical description, like an oscillator. (There’s academic research expanding this definition.) […]

Chattering hyperreal vocal rhythms, delicate sparkling piano gestures, spacey pads — I’ve built a free bank for you for Baby Audio Grainferno. Here’s the download (direct download link), plus some tips on making your own sounds and banks. Download and try now Thanks to Baby Audio for partnering with CDM and helping support this pack […]

Kyiv-based Sitka Instruments is making the awesome Gravity Eurorack clock module open-source hardware. It’s an easy and affordable build, and there are already cool alternate firmwares available, with more to come. Sitka is supporting the community — and you can give back by supporting Ukrainian causes.

Per-grain processing, automatic pitch controls, drag-and-drop modulation, and audio-rate oscillations — Grainferno proves there are still unexplored frontiers in granular synthesis and hand-crafted DSP. It’s addictive to add the synth to projects, drag in sounds, and see what you can discover.

Bitwig Studio 6 has arrived after an extended public beta period. A lot of Bitwig users might barely notice, since you switched full time to this release for its polish and workflow improvements — but here’s a refresher, with tips. With all the nuances of little workflow, editing, automation, and interface interaction tweaks, you can […]

Steinberg’s Dorico is slowly realizing a dream of notation that has spanned decades of scoring software. How could you combine engraving precision (think Leland Smith’s SCORE) with graphical ease-of-use? That might sound easy, but it’s been one of the toughest challenges in music software. Dorico 6.2 is a free update that shows how much progress they’re making — before we look to the horizon and Dorico 7.

Unofficial screen reader support in Ableton Move may be new, but it’s already a revelation. Andre Louis, a visually impaired musician and technologist/artist extraordinaire, takes us on a tour of Move Everything. That’s must-watch material, I hope, for sighted users and developers, too, to understand how these features work for visually impaired users.

With an unprecedented minimum of 450,000 people displaced in Lebanon, community-led efforts are again working to provide basic aid. These often overlap with the very music and creative communities I’ve written about here, in the country and internationally. And they can benefit from your support.

Time to dust off that TI-82, TI-83, or TI-84. The graphic calculators that a lot of us used in school can become ingenious chip synths and even run trackers. And that translates to a surprisingly powerful graphing calculator-inspired synth — one that instantly became one of my favorite plug-ins.