Nick Francis poses with his DIY, wooden controller – good enough for jazz. Photo: Justin Steyer for Seattle’s KPLU radio. In a world of disposable computers and electronics, making something “custom” is an antidote to throwaway hardware, a way of putting one’s own handiwork, care, and attention into the object with which you play music. […]

Digital musician and artist Josh Silverman began the Synplode process with something familiar – a checkerboard. Play a game of checkers on its computer vision-equipped playing field and beats and loops triggered in Ableton Live generated a responsive soundtrack for the game. But as it’s evolved, Synplode has become a general-purpose musical grid. Whether with […]

What started as an inside joke has become something of a compulsive faux pas: the Wilhelm Scream, a canned shriek that was first cleverly inserted into films as a wink and a nod between sound designers, has gotten a bit out of control. At least some sound designers are now disguising their Wilhelm Screams. But […]

As Max for Live matures, Ableton is working to convince more people to try this open-ended tool – and creations built for it – as a way of extending the experience of using Live for performance and production. For years, music software has focused on trying to do everything you need, to be a solution […]

The question of how to build controls to fly today’s live laptop music sets – whether “DJ,” “live PA,” or something else – remains open. We’ve got an inside look at the newest entry, the most recent device to explore just what should be mapped and tactile, and what should be left behind. Amidst various […]

Kinect hackery is cool, and its principle advantage is in its ability to allow multi-user interaction in space. That is, it’s killer for installations. That would make it a natural for Burning Man-based interactive art. The only problem: fancy Kinect camera, meet desert sandstorm. Open-source Kinect hacker Matt Bell decided not to wait until getting […]

It’s hard to assemble an April Fool’s Joke involving technology these days, because actual inventions keep proving stranger than fiction. When Google created a prank involving gestures for controlling email, it was only a matter of time before someone whipped up a prototype that actually did the job. The Moog Music company, therefore, may be […]

Photo (CC-BY) Chris M, of a Very Large Array. Number stations, making their appearance in the post-war radio landscape, were shortwave radio stations of streams of symbols, mysterious to their listeners and apparently code. Here, the idea of lost and indecipherable broadcasts inspires a wonderfully-varied collection of reflective artists, in a free, Creative-Commons licensed compilation […]

Three tablets – iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, and HP Touchpad. Improving like wine with age, or corked? Photo (CC-BY) Justin Ried. We’ve been watching tablets for some time now, looking for the perfect, mobile visualist performance tool. For the first time, those results begin to look genuinely promising. But here’s a surprise: it’s the Android-powered […]

If you’re in the NYC area, we hope you’ll mark your calendar; if not, we have some free listening for you to explore below. Hacking and inventing, creative musicians are making and modifying the tools of their performance to express the music they imagine, with stunning variety of results. And so it is that once […]