Betty Apple’s Taiwan Bay Be is a full-length album exploring Taiwanese identity, time travel, sound, and the cosmic. Released this year on our Establishment, Betty is now in Berlin for a live presentation on Wednesday – and she has a lot to say, from unpacking the mermaid fairy tail to imagining science fiction futures and sound’s relationship to “God” and life after death.
Music
Tbilisi’s music scene is still out in the streets, defiant
Music December 27, 2024
Interview: Michael Vincent Waller connects concert music and hip-hop
Music Stories December 26, 2024
Live radio from Gaza, Khan Younis and Bethlehem-Hebron choirs meet
Music December 24, 2024
What AI can’t do – parody – and why not
I was pondering what it was that bothered me so much about the Suno and Udio case. My pride as a composer? Erm, no. Fear of AI? Copy-pasting Abba lyrics, uh, not really. No, it’s something else…
Generative AI is “generating” existing pop songs: industry lawsuit
This week, the RIAA is suing the generative AI music startups behind Suno and Udio, claiming they’ve illegally trained their models on copyrighted music. The lawsuit reveals that you can enter simple prompts and get near-perfect clones of existing songs, down to the melody, harmony, lyrics, and arrangements. And you can hear those results for yourself.
Logic Pro for Mac 11, Logic Pro for iPad 2, reviewed: more than just AI
Logic Pro for Mac 11 and Logic Pro for iPad 2 deliver new machine learning-powered features on Apple Silicon: new Session Players, the ChromaGlow saturation model, and an integrated Stem Splitter. But AI isn’t the whole story in these two updates. Let’s talk about everything new. (Spoiler: bounce in place for external gear.)
Sinevibes has a new oscillator for KORG, and it makes additive synthesis easy
Maybe you don’t need a new synth; maybe you just need your KORG gear to add a magical new oscillator. Sinevibes Flare is here, and it takes all the good stuff in additive synthesis and makes it way more accessible, giving you rich, organic, edgy, and metallic timbres as you desire.
Intellijel’s new Atlantix is a dual-oscillator voice in 42HP with all the extras
Intellijel just dropped their new all-in-one synth voice for modular. The successor to their one-voice, SH-101-inspired Atlantis is the expanded Atlantix – and it packs a whole lot of fixins’ in that 42HP.
Final Cut Pro updates and Final Cut Camera have landed – multicam joy!
As promised last month, big Final Cut Pro updates land this week for both iPadOS and macOS. That’s accompanied by an update to Apple’s free camera app that lets you gather iPhones and iPads for a multicam rig.
4 channels of generative voltages with Noise Engineering Gamut Repetitor
Call it a Source of Sequences. Like the classic Buchla Source of Uncertainty, the Gamut Repetitor makes use of generative voltage and randomness. But it’s scaled and quantized for making triggers and voltages that you can generate continuously or loop – for far more than just chaos.
Review: Arturia FX Collection 5, with new Bus PEAK, EXCITER-104
Arturia’s FX Collection has now hit version 5, bundling all the latest releases, refreshing existing plug-ins, and revealing two all-new effects: a clipper/limiter and an exciter.
Here, have the Chipmunks singing Philip Glass’ composition Koyaanisqatsi
Philip Glass’ score for 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi is deeply moving, sombre, arresting – but have you really even heard it until you’ve heard it performed by Alvin, Simon, Theodore?