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 […]

Some people will go to great lengths just to avoid playing scales on a traditional piano-style keyboard. Rick Riday’s apparently Riday T-91 keyboard is immortalized this week on the Matrixsynth blog (via flickr). There’s a discussion of the keyboard there in comments: apparently the keyboard layout is isometric, like the Samchillian and Thummer covered earlier […]

It’s tough to make money selling music software. The market is small to begin with, made smaller when an unsettling number of users use pirated software, and divided into pieces by a range of different software. Sometimes, dead software winds up disappearing forever (Opcode Studio Vision), but sometimes it winds up free. CPS is a […]

There’s just not enough time (or money) for all the great plug-ins around. But one of my favorite instrumental plug-ins, one I can’t imagine living without, is the superb Lounge Lizard electric piano from Applied Acoustics. It’s physically modeled, not sampled, and as a result feels more organic than some of its competitors. EP-3 offered […]

In the digital age, you can pretty much output endless music, with endless resources at your disposal. So maybe it’s little surprise that music makers are looking for limiting factors — even extreme limitations, like one second duration or music produced from noise. When we ran a contest for one-second music a few months ago, […]

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and an ongoing presence in developing its open source cousin, Pure Data (Pd), recently told the Pd mailing list he had compiled Pd for Intel Macs. You can download the Intel-native version on his Website: Software by Miller Puckette (Curiously, he calls them “iMacs”, but unless he’s modified […]

Via the wonderful art and technology resource Rhizome, New Zealand-born new media guru Adam Hyde has made public a huge repository of information on, well, just about everything to do with streaming anything. Whether you’re streaming audio or video, whether you’re on Mac, Windows, or Linux, whether you’re using Pure Data or something else, if […]

Fijuu2 is the kind of art that seems to have dropped in from a wormhole from the future. It’s tough to describe, a rotating three-dimensional world in which visitors can sculpt glitchy and resonating sounds, represented by fluid 3D models, all using a standard PlayStation2 controller. We got a chance to see some stills earlier […]

Sonic Labs this week unveiled one heckuva dream machine PC tower, tweaked for pro audio: dual-core 64-bit 3.7GHz Pentium D965 Extremes, Presler chipset, high-performance everything, a graphics card that’s ready for four-monitor output, and 48 lbs. of PC performance. There are some details I really like, notably the mobile drives, which could let you pair […]