Here’s a pitch you don’t expect from an iOS developer: Dot Melody is “kind of weird and limited.” Oh yeah, and how about those glowing hands-on reviews from the first people to try it? Well, reactions “ranged from confused to outwardly hostile.” But wait – we’re in the music making business. Weird and confusing is […]

“The Algorithm.” It sounds like something ominous out of scifi – an AI character from The Matrix, maybe. It’s the name for the proprietary system by which Facebook shows you content. And this element of social media has been under fire lately, even on the global political scale. Computer rules are invisibly determining what you […]

News and information is important, but it won’t focus you on what matters. Checking Facebook might distract you, but it won’t calm you. Only music is wired directly into our mood when we’re alone. And leave the algorithms; there’s nothing like a human mix. So it is that we bring you regular mixes as windows […]

You might have some art history under your belt. Now experimental artists are giving the machines a chance to do the same. It’s called Google Arts & Culture Experiments, and it takes a new angle on machine learning. The concept: let those algorithms find new ways of venturing through the history of art and human […]

Think of it as a Christmas movie for electronic music nerds.

Now that software increasingly comes with hardware, why not have it also run standalone? That has seemed inevitable for some time. Yet, for years, MPC fans have been without a standalone hardware option from Akai. Pioneer, Elektron, and others will sell you drum machine hardware that runs on its own, but not Akai. That seems […]

Meditative sonic architecture meets a great work of modern architecture, as Alva Noto and Ryuchi Sakamoto invade Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House.

In the patterns generated by bacterial cells, Micro-ritmos discovers a new music and light. From the Mexican team of Paloma López, Leslie García, and Emmanuel Anguiano (aka Interspecifics), we get yet another marvel of open source musical interface with biological matter. Micro-ritmos from LessNullVoid on Vimeo. The raw cellular matter itself is Geobacter, an anaerobic […]

Little. Red. Different. Better. We got into the synthesizer business because we weren’t satisfied with just writing about synths. We wanted to spread a little synth love into the world, too. And wow, have our MeeBlip users responded – flooding the Internets with videos of the new synth. It’s great to see how they’re responding […]

I live on the other side of the world from where I grew up, among people of more nationalities than I can count. Here, contributors to the CDM project have spoken Dutch and Czech and Romanian as native languages. I spent the past Sunday morning jamming at an Ableton Loop session with a woman from […]