In case you haven’t seen it yet, The New York Times reports today that New York-area schoolkids have resorted to an unusual solution to cellphone bans. Apparently unaware of phones’ vibrate mode, the students have opted for an incredibly annoying ringtone pitched at 17,000 Hz. Theoretically, “adults” shouldn’t be able to hear that. (The real […]

Hearing over the din of noise is something that humans do a lot better than computers. A new mathematical technique promises to provide highly accurate models of sound, even with broadband noise in the picture. Why does this matter, aside from mathematical curiosity? For one, better sonic analysis could mean more realistic models of instruments […]

Hungarian composer György Ligeti died in Vienna today. (See Bloomberg.com obituary, Jam obituary, Wikipedia entry with many links.) I can think of few composers who have been as inspiring and imaginative in their sound world as Maestro Ligeti. While he largely shunned electronic music production, his music for choir and orchestra challenges electronic and acoustic […]

Cakewalk has launched a Cakewalk-only MySpace page for their users. It’s a blend of commercial endeavor and community site. On the commercial side, there’s a fair amount of advertising of Cakewalk products and the Cakewalk tour. That to me is overkill, since usually the most passionate advertising comes from your users. But there are some […]

Gaming environments like Quake and Unreal have become easy interactive 3D development environments. Modify the game maps and objects, and you can make the visual realm in these games whatever you want. But for digital musicians imagining a 3D environment for creating music and sound, they’re limited. Enter the latest project from fijuu2 creator Julian […]

After all that fuss with USB and FireWire guitars carrying audio, what a lot of guitarists want to be able to do is just to plug their guitar into MIDI so they can trigger soft synths without a keyboard. Aside from instruments like the Brian Moore iGuitar, as of last week you have a new […]

We’ve covered rack rigs for rack-mounting PCs, Power Macs, and even Mac minis for the stage for a while. Now, I’m going to go an extra step, and actually build a machine step-by-step here on CDM. But instead of making a rack-mountable machine, I wanted something even more portable. I want a desktop-class PC I […]

Every keyboard, drum pad, and audio interface these days seems to be crammed with MIDI faders and knobs, and (if you’re lucky) LCDs. If you’re like me, you’re rapidly running out of money and/or room for yet another dedicated control surface. Wouldn’t it be great to take better advantage of these controls with programs like […]

Sound editing can be an unenviable job: against some sometimes absurdly tight deadlines, you have to work with complex, extensive changes to the film or TV show. Virtual Katy is a piece of software that integrates with Final Cut and Avid video editing and handles conforming — basically, taking all those changes and making everything […]