Bit Shifter & Flight404 • “Feedback” / “Flight Risk” from Bit Shifter on Vimeo. It’s not just sound going chip, lo-fi, retro. Live visuals are, too. With Jaymis at Brisbane’s Game On fest and New York’s chip blowout the Blip Festival coming up next week, it seems a perfect time to look at some inspired […]

FMOD is a wildly popular sound engine for games, used widely in games for PCs, consoles, and portables alike. FMOD is known for being on the bleeding edge as far as capabilities, but even given that, it’s a pleasant surprise that the engine has now made its way to the iPhone and iPod touch. It’s […]

Running Vista? Running Processing? This is important: you’ll want to apply this fix if working with fullscreen apps (as you would be as a live visualist). The short version: there’s a property to set if you’re working in an IDE (Eclipse / NetBeans. If you’re just working in Processing, the easiest thing to do is […]

Tired: Trying to get publicity for software updates. Wired: using publicity for software as a reason to finish an update! Ilias Bergstrom has a new release up of an open-source project designed to make it easier to play live with Processing. With all-important support for 0156 (which again restores proper fullscreen operation, this is the […]

Quartz Composer/VDMX tutorial no 1: The bouncing ball from goto10 on Vimeo. Trying to learn Apple’s free visual patching tool Quartz Composer, useful for making your own filters and simple generative effects? Or perhaps you’re learning VDMX, the brilliant, semi-modular Mac-friendly visual tool – which also happens to host Quartz Composer compositions as effects or […]

Ilias Bergstrom has created a tool for mixing Processing sketches live in performance. (Thanks, Bart!) The resulting tool lets you cross-fade between sketches and easily host a series of sketches in a gig. The process is pretty straightforward: 1. Use the included Foetus library with your sketch to prepare it for use (your sketch needs […]

Better support for music and audio is still evolving (as well as lots of stability and compatibility improvements), but I have faith open-source coding tool Processing [site | on cdmu | on cdmo ] could yield wonderful new visual interfaces for music. Daniel Piker has the latest addition, inspired by a recent post here: FizzyNumberMusicMaker […]

Cypod sends his simple but handy adjustable tremolo plug-in, which he’s made available free: Tremolo Audio Unit [Cypod blog] But that’s only half of the reason this is cool. He used the SuperColliderAU tool, which allows sonic effects built in the free, open-source audio coding language SuperCollder to become standard AU plug-ins. (He demonstrates it […]

Cakewalk didn’t really need to implement custom profile support for SONAR 8 under Vista. You don’t really need to make use of it. But when I found out Cakewalk’s CTO had a profile he liked, I had to share it with fellow tweakers. Adjustments under the hood: photo (CC) Stefan Sonntag. Earlier this fall, we […]

From the time we’re kids, we use gestures to make music – shaking, tapping, moving our bodies around, and connecting physical movement to sound. The idea of using these kinds of gestures to control digital music has been something researchers have worked on for many years. But with increasingly smart phones, equipped with mics, tilt […]