c Ever feel like you’ve found the seam dividing past and future? The past: restrictive UI frameworks requiring pages and pages of code to produce dated-look 2D displays. Proprietary software with rigid interfaces. Input bottlenecked through the x and y coordinates of a single mouse pointer. The future: UIs whipped together graphically or with a […]

The Latest Version of Bidule features an OSC Monitor and WaveViewer. Ed.: Plogue Bidule is an unusual animal: this affordable patching tool resists conventional ways of doing things, down to its hatred of the number “1.0.” But Plogue has an underground following inside the already-underground world of modular patching tools for creative music. I’ve invited […]

Ever wished you could pack the sonic goodness and programming power of a soft synth into a hardware box? Dreamed of software that lived in a road case and had the stability and power-on capability of your outboard gear? You’re certainly not alone. That meant many of us were intrigued when soft synth emulator house […]

VJ Kung Fu: Structure in VJ Performance from Momo the Monster on Vimeo. Sometimes, paradoxically, doing more prep and adding more structure is what allows you to really let loose when you improvise. That’s true of music, and it’s just as true of visuals. You’ve no doubt seen “button-mashing”, chaotic VJ sets – and maybe, […]

Morgan Packard (music) and Joshue Ott (visuals) at Mutek in 2008. I’m really excited to play with these guys, as I think they have a lot of great ideas about the collaboration between music and visuals. Photo: mutek2007. VJs and visualists are often asked to just make something nice happen behind musicians. What if that […]

I may have to eat my words — here’s something I didn’t imagine being possible any time soon. It’s extremely processor-intensive computer vision, happening in a video stream, all with JavaScript worker threads. That is, this is possible because the next version of Firefox, version 3.1, allows for multiple threads processing the video instead of […]

Very often, computers and music gear greedily consume whole corners of the room. Here’s a tidy alternative, modest in space consumption as well as in cost. So, what’s so wonderful about DIY creations by our friend Sasa Djuric (aka fibra)? It isn’t just that his stands are recycled from monitor stand parts. It’s not just […]

“Evacuate City-17 at once — if not sooner.” It’s started. Once the domain of big-budget productions, cheap computers (and even open-source tools) now offer more than enough power to enable indie productions to imagine special effects. The remaining gaps: talent and skill. That’s why people actually shouldn’t be surprised that it’s possible to make a […]

Chris Breen at Macworld does exceptional, tough reviews of consumer sound software. He’s tackled GarageBand ’09 in depth in a review published this week at Macworld.com. If you’re a beginning user, this review is for you – and if not, Chris will help you understand what that perspective is like for countless typical Mac users: […]

Twitter has been (rightfully, in many cases) maligned as a distraction, but at times the “microblog” can keep us connected in smaller bits of time, not larger. People read while something is rendering, when they feel a bit lonely or distracted to begin with (a bit like taking work to a virtual coffee shop), while […]