Pioneering circuit bender Reed Ghazala has originated such oddball creations as the brilliant Aleatron keyboards (shown). Once innocent low-end Casios and the like, Reed’s circuit-bent mutants generate aleatoric music as you play them and, of course, look like they escaped some odd extradimensional alien music factory. Check out Reed’s instrument sales gallery and bent sound […]

What, Nintendo, a video game company? Naw, CDM continues to gather more and more evidence that what Nintendo really wants to be is interactive performance artists. IGN reports last month Nintendo even staged a live interactive exhibit and music performance in Japan to launch the upcoming Nintendo DS game ElectroPlankton. (Articles, photos, and videos at […]

Sure, you may be a big fan of All Things Considered — but have you considered getting audio advice from pro NPR and PRI vets? That’s exactly the idea behind the superb site Transom, which brings in public radio experts and celebrities to talk about sound, radio production, and how you can create your own […]

Are you anxiously awaiting the death of the 5-pin DIN MIDI cable? This dinosaur used by standard MIDI equipment was already retro when it was introduced for music in 1985, but there’s nothing quite as powerful as the status quo. (Besides, we’ve seen jitter and other problems on some USB and FireWire MIDI devices, so […]

Regine reports from Cybersonica on a “manual input” method for controlling sound and image — no, really “manual,” as in hands — on Near Near Future. Golan Levin and Zachary Lieberman have developed a system that analyzes hand movements above an overhead projector. Projected imagery combines the direct output of the overhead (i.e., they shine […]

Gyms and sports clubs: they stock up on gear so you don’t have to. Pay a membership fee, show up, use their stuff, leave. No wonder the idea is popular in New York, where our apartments barely fit “luxuries” like, you know, beds. Now the idea is coming to music making, says Remix Transmissions. Yes, […]

Cycling 74’sMax/MSP and Jitter offer awesome power for developing interactive multimedia, but building everything from scratch can get time-consuming fast. Part of the draw of reusable objects is the ability to incorporate time-saving pre-built tools rather than reinventing the wheel with each new project. That’s the idea behind the insanely-cool bundle of Max goodies, Electrotap’s […]

We continue our look at studios we wish we had by going to . . . Branson, Missouri?! Yes, Branson is now home of the elegant Citywalk Studios. Here’s the good news: you can find out just about everything you need to learn about acoustic treatment from the Auralex website; Citywalk’s builders made use of […]

If you’re DJing, pray that you’ll wind up gigging at Ministry of Sound London. The place is loaded with Allen & Heath’s Xone DJ gear line. Aside from the rotary Xone:V6 mixer, laptop DJs can opt for the MIDI-enabled Xone:92. Evidence that some DJs need to brush up on their Audio Processing 101: MoS head […]

If you want your fans to be able to remix, mash, and recreate your music, you could adopt new remix-friendly digital distribution formats, or even give people your work as a GarageBand file. Of course, for maximum flexibility there’s a centuries-old technology that’s even better: notation. Using Sibelius, the Pat Metheny Group has put its […]