Poor Tia Thomas! Here’s a whiz kid who can spell ortstein, velocious, marmoreal, and totipalmate, and she has the misfortune to be eliminated from the National Spelling Bee on the word Theremin: Theremin ends spelling bee contestant’s hopes [Theremin World] (She guessed “Theramin”, which Theremin World’s Jason notes is a misspelling widely spread on eBay.) […]

Okay, easy on the Clinton jokes, kids, but just a day after we learn an online fashion ‘zine is making music by recording clothing, we see that a team at NYU is taking the next step: using zippers as musical controllers. (Safe for work — they didn’t get that carried away.) The neatest part of […]

Fashion and sound usually involves pumping soundtracks on the runway. SHOWstudio, an “online fashion broadcasting company,” has its own idea: they’re taking leading garments from this season into an anechoic chamber, where they’ll record the literal sound of the garments. “Feathers, sequins, glass crystals and beads, nylon, taffeta, leather, velvet, jacquard, zips and metallic chains” […]

You may have heard something or other about “Digidesign Trade-in Programs,” but usually it involves high-end Digi equipment costing thousands of dollars. Now, Digidesign has a trade-in program for “the rest of us”: Turbocharged LE Trade-in Promotion Here’s my take on whether you’ll actually want this:

Good news, Pro Tools fans. Pro Tools LE (supported by the 002 and Mbox/Mbox2 audio hardware) and Pro Tools M-Powered (which runs on a wide range of M-Audio hardware) are now Intel Mac-native. Given what we’ve seen from Ableton Live and Apple Logic Pro, you should see some impressive performance out of Pro Tools on […]

Whether you’re composing for real orchestrations, scoring films or games, teaching, or just learning more about how the orchestra works, there’s never a time when you stop learning about orchestration. That’s why a new free, online version of a classic Russian orchestration guide, complete with new interactive examples, is good news. Sample designers Garritan Library, […]

Since I couldn’t be at Cybersonica in London, some of the fabulously imaginative sound art slipped through the cracks. Here’s a brief look at the remaining pieces: Schizoporotica is a music box that plays torn scraps of paper. The object itself is quite gorgeously decorated, and it looks like people had great fun tearing up […]

The Etch-a-Sound, shown at London’s recent Cybersonica sound art fair, lets visitors draw in 3D using their voice. It’s a bizarre idea, and the right-angle pipes recall a classic 3D animation as much as the original Etch-a-Sketch (awful model for intuitive illustration that the toy was), but it’s great fun. The creators also did a […]

Don’t let anyone outgeek you. Fire up that command prompt and get your MIDI chores done fast, without all that mucking about with your mouse. (You know, it is often slower to mouse around, you’ve got to admit.) Div’s MIDI Utilities for Windows (via) Div’s MIDI Utilities for UNIX (definitely runs on Linux as it […]