CDM Forums: Discover New Music, Share Your Work, and Find Collaborators

By popular request, we’ve launched a new forum for Create Digital Music (and, soon, Create Digital Motion): Share Your Work – CDM Forums If you want to hear fellow CDM readers’ music, share your own, show off your crazy new interactive installation or VJ reel, look for collaborators to work on a song or to […]

Free Plug-ins in Magazines: Lounge Lizard Session in Keys, Audio Damage Pulse Modulator in Computer Music

Pick up a European electronic music magazine and you can hit a jackbot of free software. Sometimes that’s limited to free samples, but sometimes you get some cool stuff you couldn’t otherwise. (For those of you outside Europe, they do make it to newsstands, albeit at an inflated price; I can usually find them at […]

Leave No Child Behind in Theremin Education

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.) […]

The Sound of Clothes: Zipper Orchestra

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 […]

The Sound of Clothes: Recording Nylon, Sequins, and Zippers in an Anechoic Chamber

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” […]

Digidesign Wants Your Old Pro Tools LE Hardware

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:

Pro Tools LE, M-Powered Now Native for Intel Macs, Enhanced PowerPC Support

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 […]

Orchestration Course Goes “Open Source”: Free Online Course, Driven by Community

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, […]