The consumer electronic drive to high definition and virtual reality is having a curious, parallel impact on sound. And so it is that Sennheiser now want to market binaural recording to your average smartphone owner – really. Now, of course, the normal human perception of reality includes both visual depth perception and the ability to […]

Last week’s CES trade show was full of weird and unlikely inventions. But some of them point at directions in tech that could bear fruit. Take this Sony Xperia Projector prototype. The consumer benefits aren’t immediately clear – but media artists may see the perfect self-contained interactive installation. The Verge gets a hands-on with the […]

It’s good to be Max Cooper. The artist’s richly crafted sound designs are paired now with a series of music videos commissioned by motion designers. And the most mesmerizing of these is the stunning creation by Maxime Causeret. Driven by the organic sounds of recorded rain, spun into percussion, Causeret’s animations follow emergent systems of […]

Following Akai’s announcement of the new standalone MPC models – MPC X and MPC Live – they’ve also released some videos. Sound on Sound has a walkthrough: And there’s the requisite promo film from Akai: It’s important to note that adding standalone mode here doesn’t mean taking away anything from the computer/hardware combo. The software […]

Welcome to the post-PC drum machine age. After years of leaving fans of standalone MPCs in the cold, Akai have unveiled machines that promise the flexibility of computer software – minus the computer. Specs and photos went live on the Sweetwater website this morning with complete specs, and now are also live on Akai’s site. […]

Happy New Year? Not yet. In the universe of music gear, the NAMM show in California is a sort of unspoken new year’s holiday – home to the biggest wave of music tech announcements of the year. It doesn’t cover everything, as many music producer-specific makers have fled the pricey trade show booths for more […]

The early days of January – the email inbox is still quiet, things are for many still moving slow. But if musical perspective is possible only with hindsight, it’s a moment when the picture of a moment in musical history has first crystallized. The zeitgeist of an era starts to reveal its footprint. This isn’t […]

AMULETS is Randall Taylor, a one-man experimental looping ambient artist out of Austin, Texas who works with tape loops and guitar. And to start off the year, Randall wants to show you a key element of his technique – making tape loops from cassette tapes. Tape loops, as associated with the likes of Steve Reich, […]

Pure Data, the free and open source cousin of Max, can still learn some new tricks. And that’s important – because there’s nothing that does quite what it does, with a free, visual desktop interface, permissive license, and embeddable and mobile versions integrated with other software, free and commercial alike. A community of some of […]

It’s happened: CD players are officially retro/vintage. (Heck, so is the iPod at this point.) But that means it’s time to open them up and glitch them out – at least for some intrepid inventors, that is. Actually, this video is itself vintage, coming from the innocent days of 2012. (Ah – remember then? If […]