Follow your ears! Yes, there was a time when aural senses were vital to location and geography. In the spirit of resurrecting that spirit, Spencer Kiser’s projects look at new ways of mapping using sound. Full details on his thesis page, but in brief: Sound maps: Field recordings in Forest Hills, Queens (outside Manhattan) are […]

PACE Anti-Piracy announced today that InterLok 5.4 for Mac will support both Intel-native and Universal binaries. What did I just say? Let’s translate that to English: if you’ve been waiting for music software to go Intel-native on Mac, one major hurdle was just cleared. PACE provides the copy protection in a broad range of Mac […]

Cybersonica is underway in London, bringing with it wild, new sound art. Organizer Chris O’Shea puts it this way: The works selected . . . move beyond the ‘screen, keyboard, mouse scenario’ and respond to physical input, proximity, sound, kinetics, elapsed time and the surrounding environment. Check out the preview videos, photos, and descriptions at […]

Speaking of 20th Century spirits, Matrixsynth sends us a photoset of rare images from the demonstration album put out by RCA for their Mark II synthesizer. We’ve looked at the Mark II on this site before; it’s a little like the Model T of electronic synthesis: RCA Mark II Demonstration Record What I especially love […]

Launching us into the weekend are some fabulously fun Flickr finds, forwarded by fine folks and friends: Pheezy (aka Evan Cordes) got a look at the sirens, automated pianos and drums, and other mechanical musical wonders on display at the National Gallery’s installation of Ballet Mechanique, as seen here previously. He took some photos of […]

Novation’s SL series seeks to finally liberate us from manually assigning MIDI controllers to software, by automatically assigning its generous set of controls and displaying parameters on a lovely high-contrast onboard display. It could be just the thing for laptop-based performers, but a lot of us already have more keyboards than we need. If it’s […]

Apple’s Logic Pro and Express 7.2 were the first major music applications out the door with support for Intel Macs when they came out early this spring. As a result, though, Apple was a bit ahead of the curve: the Intel Mac ReWire SDK wasn’t available yet from Propellerhead, so Apple couldn’t include support for […]

Native Instruments’ hotly-anticipated solution for playing soft synths, cataloging sounds, and performing with software in the studio and onstage is here. KORE is now available in stores and shipping, with a street around US$500 (just under US$1500 buys you KORE plus Native’s insanely massive Komplete collection of instruments as part of a special intro). Native […]

Tonight here in New York, I’ll be presenting a free workshop on detecting and visualizing motion from camera inputs, which may be of interest not only for those of you eagerly anticipating the new Create Digital Motion site, but also anyone who’d like to use cameras as controllers for music. Full details after the jump. […]

I don’t care how great your touch typing skills are, when you’ve been drinking beer and jumping around on stage for an hour you’re going to need some light to help you trigger that next sample. Fortunately for laptop performers an increasing number of current machines are coming with integrated lighting solutions. Whether it’s the […]