It’s March the 3rd, which means in both hemispheres, our thoughts inevitably turn to basslines and squelchy resonance. Happy 303 day – here’s some video and reading to get you in the mood.
Music
Utrecht’s Le Guess Who? festival chronicles a broken visa system
Music November 7, 2024
Arash Azadi’s music returns to primordial states of human existence
Music November 6, 2024
Take a 3D trip into experimental turntablism with V-A-C Moscow, Shiva Feshareki
Complex music conjures up radical, fluid architectures, vivid angles – why not experience those spatial and rhythmic structures together? Here’s insight into a music video this week in which experimental turntablism and 3D graphics collide.
Azure Kinect promises new motion, sensing for art
Gamers’ interest may come and go, but artists are always exploring the potential of computer vision for expression. Microsoft this month has resurrected the Kinect, albeit in pricey, limited form. Let’s fit it to the family tree.
This free Ableton Live device makes images into wavetables
It’s the season of the wavetable – again. With Ableton Live 10.1 on the horizon and its updated Wavetable device, we’ve got yet another free Max for Live device for making sound materials – and this time, you can make your wavetables from images.
A plea to DJs: make sharing part of digging
Many DJs still believe track lists and track IDs are proprietary information to be guarded … for some reason. But however defensible this position may have been in the past, opening up information matters now like never before.
The monster modular MacBeth Elements One, unleashed at last
It’s a module as big as Scotland and as loud as creator Ken MacBeth. But the module, spotted rarely like the folkloric monster it is, seems about to go from legend to product.
Generate wavetables for free, for Ableton Live 10.1 and other synths
Wavetables are capable of a vast array of sounds. But just dumping arbitrary audio content into a wavetable is unlikely to get the results you want. And that’s why Wave Weld looks invaluable: it makes it easy to generate useful wavetables, in an add-on that’s free for Max for Live.
MidiWrist aids instrumentalists by giving Siri and Apple Watch control
Grabbing the mouse, keyboard, or other controller while playing an instrument is no fun. Developer Geert Bevin has a solution: put an Apple Watch or (soon) iPhone’s Siri voice command in control.
The demonic musical Baby Bots of Moon Armada
Why should a synth be a metal box with some wooden endcaps? Why shouldn’t be a severed baby doll head with glowing red eyes and buttons in its skull? Moon Armada helps the forward evolution of synth form factors, and the results are … uh … adorable is the word?
A free, shared visual playground in the browser: Olivia Jack talks Hydra
Reimagine pixels and color, melt your screen live into glitches and textures, and do it all for free on the Web – as you play with others. We talk to Olivia Jack about her invention, live coding visual environment Hydra.