In our monster MeeBlip round-up the other day, I mentioned the stunning enclosure Michael Roebbeling made for his DIY synth kit. But that’s not all Michael has built. He’s also created a lovely, simple step sequencer with Arduino. It’s a beautiful combination of all open-source hardware, MeeBlip and Arduino. Surprisingly, it’s his first try at […]

One top prize-winner: Stringer, which applied Kinect camera magic to simulated strings. More on how it was made below. Photo (CC-BY) Thomas Bonte. With Web data providers offering generous cash prizes and a strong emphasis on harnessing data to transform listening, music consumption took center stage at Music Hack Day’s debut in New York. But […]

One keyboard, a mind-bending nine engines, lots of tech specs … now that we’ve lived in a world of impressive, technically-intimidating workstation keyboards for a couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine your eyes glazing over when there’s a new one, let alone the general public. So, what might get your attention? This. “Workstation keyboard” […]

TouchOSC makes an appearance as musicians hack control at our Handmade Music Open Lab in New York Saturday. Photo by Matos; used with permission. See his (not entirely safe for work) art portfolio. TouchOSC has become something of a standard on iOS for touch control, thanks to desktop editor apps for custom layouts and high-contrast, […]

Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

New ideas and invention are wonderful things – so long as you don’t have any illusions about cost and payoff, that is. So, with that cheeky headline, here’s Roger Linn. He writes us: I thought you might get a kick out of this and maybe some of your DIY readers might find it useful. Occasionally […]

What could audiovisual art made for tablets look like? Some dismiss the results as “toys.” The creators of Thicket embrace that very role. Thicket, the product of electronic A/V artists Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, is intended as a kind of immersive distraction, filling the screen of an Apple handheld or iPad with clouds of […]

Audiovisual technology has returned to spectacle. Artists are armed with new technologies for fusing space and image, sound and sight. What they tend not to have is permanent spaces. And that lack of venues has made audiovisual artists nomadic and provisional, constrained to hastily-provisioned, rectangular, sometimes dim projections. In short, for revolutions to happen, you […]

Call it future shock. Love of retro gear is more than nostalgia; sometimes it takes time to appreciate what technology means. And so, today, classic digital samplers and drum machines like the E-mu SP-1200 and SP-12 can inspire even greater passion than they did when new. Today, producers can feel love not only for retro […]