It’s the same old story: if you love Apple, you better also love carrying around little adapters. In a surprise to no one, latest reports – including one from Fast Company – suggest Apple is about to nix the 3.5mm “minijack” analog headphone jack from its next iPhone. (iPad and presumably laptops, too, would be […]

Link is a marvel – even if you never touch Ableton Live. Grab some iOS gadgets, put them on the same wireless network, and you get rock-solid sync that responds dynamically to any tempo change on any device. But, come on. Love you iPad as you may, you don’t want to play only with apps. […]

It’s an edge-of-your-seat race against the 555. Our friend Darsha Hewitt went up in front of one of the world’s nerdiest crowds: the Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress gathering in Germany. Whereas some people guzzle bubbly and lean in for kisses and watch balls drop at the turn of a new year, the legendary geekfest involves […]

The Technics SL-1200 turntable that defined DJing with record players has been awaiting a successor for some time now. Pioneer’s PLX-1000 is already earning some acclaim among DJs; it looks and feels like an SL-1200, but has great control and stability. Well, now it’s Panasonic’s turn. Having revived the Technics moniker for the hi-fi market, they had […]

It’s not enough just to gripe about something not being good enough, to tally a criticism of a product in the “cons” side of a review. Intrepid musician-hackers are going and just changing it themselves. Karg, the Heidelberg-based musician (with an ‘a’), is a fan of Korg, the manufacturer (with an ‘o’). And presumably when […]

It’s an arbitrary division of time. But watching the calendar tick is a chance to review what really matters. And ignore the naysayers: this is a wonderful time for music, in quality and diversity, not just quantity. So, let’s use the beginning of the new year to queue up the best music from the old. […]

Much can be said and felt with the human voice without words – and that’s where Robert AA Lowe comes in. With his solo drone/improvisational project Lichens, or lending his talents as a singer, synthesist, and instrumentalist to the likes of OM, Lowe has carved out a unique and powerful space as an artist with […]

Reaktor Blocks is already a lovely hybrid. It has the open-ended sound design possibilities and knob-tweaking delights of modular instruments, down to the look and feel of that gear. But it blends those design features with the sound-making capabilities of digital software – and you never run out of cables, space, or cash. Of course, […]

Urs Heckmann just combined “reverb” with “experimental, possibly sonically unstable plug-in with unpredictable results.” And it’s free. Urs – how did you know exactly what I wanted for Christmas?

In the past weeks, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to astronauts and aeronautical engineers, to artists in residence in space centers (with ESA) and aboard “vomet comet” airplane microgravity experiments (in Russia). A common theme has emerged. Just as images from space once transformed our perception, the next frontier is sound. From spatial sound […]