In the box, inside the world of the computer, sound has few limits. It’s clean, it’s pristine; mimicking perfectly-miked drum kits or high-fidelity sounds is as easy as dialing in the gigs of samples you’ve assembled. But … wait a minute. It’s too clean. There’s something beautiful about a digital circuit, screaming and crunching as […]

Art in light and sound is routinely spread across venues, or sprawling through buildings in the horizontal. Not at TodaysArt. The festival in The Hague, Netherlands went vertical. Taking to the nineteen-floor tower of the former Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations (Binnenlandse Zaken) and the Atrium of the City Hall, the festival established their […]

It was only a matter of time. An intrepid Lemur for iPad user has devised a template that emulates Ableton’s Push hardware. Cleverly entitled “Shove,” the template isn’t just a little like Push. It actually allows you to use the iPad as surrogate for Ableton’s hardware. You configure the iPad input and output and then […]

If there was any doubt left, the analog monosynth keyboard has gone mainstream now. Fusing 70s electronic instrument design ideas with nerdy lust for sound with modern ideas about connectivity, accessibility, and timbre, a generation of instruments has made it a wonderful time for synth lovers to be alive. And the latest from Arturia is […]

The problem with most delays is that they’re a bit like dumping water on your whole project, rather than a precise shade of watercolor. They delay everything at once. So, then there are multi-tap delays, and more precise delays. And then there’s Multitude, a kind of delay studio that allows you to produce rhythmic delay […]

The usual advice applies: if you’re thinking of rushing to update to a major new OS, and you’re a musician, take your time. That’s the advice for OS X Mavericks as it would be for any big update to OS X, Windows, Linux, and now even iOS. But with that disclaimer, OS X Mavericks is […]

Ableton’s Push really is growing on me; it’s astounding to have lots of the working methods from software integrated on a piece of hardware, in pads and buttons and knobs. But because it does so much, because it’s open to so many tasks, it isn’t something that reveals itself in just a day. From mapping […]

After years of frustration with computer vision on general-purpose computers, the upcoming second-generation Kinect sensor really does begin to look like a breakthrough. And that breakthrough happens inside the hardware design, a System on a Chip that yields high performance data transfers that simply aren’t possible on the laptop in front of you. The site […]

The perception of digital media and electronic arts has changed. These media once caused riots; they once earned angry cries of artificiality (even the very term “synthesizer” was derogatory). They alarmed and shocked even recently. And then, more recently, use of raw digital sounds, of glitches and hard edges, were seen even by digital art […]

The perception of digital media and electronic arts has changed. These media once caused riots; they once earned angry cries of artificiality (even the very term “synthesizer” was derogatory). They alarmed and shocked even recently. And then, more recently, use of raw digital sounds, of glitches and hard edges, were seen even by digital art […]