Friends bragging lately about the quality of the sound of their drum machines? Tell them you can make sounds lower fidelity than they can. LUNCHBEAT is a 1-bit groovebox, making impossibly-dirty digital sounds, with a built-in step sequencer. While we await a proper DIY kit, it’s an ideal learning project: it’s nice and simple, has […]

Enough of the Web teaser campaigns, the press conferences with bottles of beer at exhibition centers, the trade show booths … let’s party instead. That’s how Elektron, the makers of Machinedrum, will celebrate their next launch. November the 23rd is the date, and, naturally, CDM will be there. Elektron are even coming down from Sweden […]

Since its release, Syphon has demonstrated how visual materials can be more fluid on computers. The open source technology on OS X has changed the way people work with visual apps, become the key enabling tech that helped popularize streaming visuals to dedicated mapping applications, and, probably, convinced more than a few people to splurge […]

If James Bond had a DJ controller, it might look like this. Faderfox, known primarily for ultra-small-form factor controllers, this time has something that looks more like a full-featured, two-deck (or four-deck), two-channel DJ controller. And that’s good news for people wanting a general-purpose, all-in-one DJ control surface with the Faderfox feel and features. The […]

New York startup littleBits and founder Ayah Bdeir helped pioneer the modern definition of open source hardware. But they also put it into action, getting even young kids snapping together their own hardware ideas. The process is addictively simple: whereas platforms like Arduino require breadboards and wires, littleBits’ tiny circuits are already pre-made and snap […]

(NSFW… ish.) Yes, Rolling Stone brought in heavy hitters on this spot, which is either parody, self-parody, trying to get you to read Rolling Stone for its rock coverage, trying to get you to read Rolling Stone for its EDM coverage, or just generally trying to make Rolling Stone seem hip and relevant. At least […]

Can shiny, rotating 3D eye candy have a message? They can if they’re in the masterful hands of motion graphics / visualist wizard Beeple, aka Mike Winkelmann. His latest short is retina-singeing, brain-stimulating imagination of the issue of transparency and data privacy, in the age of Snowden and the NSA, targeted Facebook ads, Foursquare check-ins, […]

Our digital world tends to accumulate layers of detritus, much of it banal remains – orphaned cords and power adapters. And then there are cheap computer speakers, which you might think have achieved some sort of means of asexual reproduction. They’re everywhere: on shelves, in closets, given away, left on the street. It’s time to […]

So, without a line of code, you want to make something new, visually. You’ve got Max, you’ve got Pd, you’ve got vvvv. But for quickly cooking up generative visuals, dynamic interaction, live animation, and more from a clean slate, the other option had been Apple’s Quartz Composer, a tool that has lost a lot of […]

Patchblocks’ creator says he wanted this hardware sound construction set to be like a combination of Max, Arduino, Moog, and LEGO. And in a novel, crowd-funded project, you get a set of units that seem very much like that. “Modular” is the angle, like a variety of hardware we’ve seen lately. And the Patchblocks satisfyingly […]