It turns Logic Pro into a game level editor. It makes a standard MIDI file into a terrain of platforms to explore. As you navigate, your footfalls on piano roll-visualized notes procedurally generate sound effects and music. And it turns General MIDI — and Super Midio, and my personal favorite, the SysExorcist — into heroes. […]

Electronic and digital visuals are expanding in their expressive potential, as live and real-time instruments, performances, and interactive installations. But the venues and contexts for that work remain understood in terms of narrow, older categories: the gallery and video art, the club and “VJing” – and now, increasingly, via commercial patrons (search engines, trade shows). […]

Artists David Abravanel (music) and Theresa Baumgartner (visuals) joined us at the inaugural installment of the CDM co-hosted unrender to take us on a fluid journey through dreamy imagery and sounds. As we get ready for unrender #2 on Friday, David and Theresa share a bit of their process and ideas. Here’s their work, live: […]

Play House from Alex Allmont on Vimeo. “Play House” — get it? Playing with LEGOs seems to have an ongoing intuitive connection to musicians, to composition and musical play. So, of course, after we commented on the LEGO Maschine controller hack at MIDI Hack at Stockholm last weekend, several of you reminded us of this […]

Everything old is new again, again. You see, those pocket-able supercomputer phones with the very-decent optics and imaging can bring back a love of photography, and photography can bring back a love of cel animation. Thank the smartphone’s portability and convenience, perfectly-suited to repetitive tasks like capturing impromptu cels on the go. And that can […]

As the consumer electronics industry struggles to work out what people want in wearable technology, the people are speaking. We want – no, need – neckwear that lights up in sync to music as we play. Clearly. Well, anyway, that’s what Hector Urtubia – aka Mr Book – is doing in his latest hack. It’s […]

Remember downloads? Remember CDs? Remember vinyl? Add to that – streams. Because Algoriddim adding Spotify to djay is earth-shaking. Sure, Pacemaker did this in February. But that app was thin on some critical features DJs need, and the Spotify integration was lackluster. This is different. djay is a mature, full-featured DJ app – maybe not […]

iMaschine was always an intriguing drum machine, with uncommonly-simple on-the-go audio sampling and a workflow that lets you bring drumkits back into Maschine on desktop. But it was hampered by limitations: you couldn’t set loop points properly, and there was no version for the iPad. iMaschine 1.1 doesn’t give you everything you’d ever want, but […]

You can now run Traktor on the iPad, but with a fraction of the power of the desktop Traktor. Or you can map Traktor’s capabilities to hardware controllers – just expect to make some choices, and spread out some controllers. A new Lemur template for iPad does something different: it controls nearly everything from custom […]

It’s time for some Reaktor love. Native Instruments’ Reaktor may not get the attention of tools like Traktor or Maschine. But the software is part of the company’s DNA, still used to prototype devices (like the new drum synths for Maschine), and able to create a vast array of instruments and effects for those willing […]