Playlist: The Best Music Mixes, Jams, and Releases to Queue Up Now

Our cup runneth over. And just as we’re adding our favorite stories to read to the new Reading List feature, we bring you some of our favorite listening. This is what’s playing through my cans as I’m working and meditating. Releases Ras G – Back On The Planet is, simply, out of this world. Forget […]

Gazing Back at You: Responsive Typography and Face Tracking [Source]

Camera input is at last going from waving your arms around in front of the screen to some genuinely compelling ideas. And the more designers use the camera in fluid ways, the more expressive video may be as a means of interaction. Croatian designer Marko Dugonjić demonstrates a proof-of-concept implementation of typography that responds to […]

What Can You Hack on KORG volca series? First Mod Details, as KOMA Meets KORG [Video]

When KORG’s Tatsuya Takahashi is involved in a project, you can expect some hackability. KORG surprised the music tech community by releasing filter schematics for its monotron and designing the boards for the monotron and Monotribe in such a way that opened them to modifications – like adding much-needed MIDI capability absent on those first […]

KORG volca keys Hands-on: Probably the volca You Most Want [Sounds]

KORG’s volca line of affordable analog instruments isn’t yet available everywhere, but they’re slowly, slowly trickling into the world. KORG hasn’t yet sent any to CDM, and we’re generally hearing “September” from most retailers, but Japan has got a few. One of those was store-bought and brought back to Berlin, and I got to play […]

Wacky, Wooden Shnth Makes Eerie Sounds, Colors Outside the Lines [Documentary]

Shnth is a digital synth in a wooden box with a surprisingly open-ended programming language. It’s like a lo-fi sonic computer, touched with your fingers via a handmade interface, and with sonic capabilities that can be re-programmed over USB. And there’s a coloring book to go with it, too, with pictures of Max Mathews and […]

An Exquisite Corpse Game Jam, Made with OSC, Starts this Week

Game jams have already begun encouraging creative, improvisatory game jam, by gathering designers and artists together and motivating them with tight deadlines. But here’s a new concept: what if all the games could talk to one another? What if they could all respond to the same basic game inputs, but with differing results? Using the […]

FireBird 2, “Harmonic Content Morphing” Synth Plug-in, Now Free [Windows]

With so many choices, some beautiful software synths simply fall through the cracks – or fail to keep up with tastes and attentions. TONE2, maker of a number of nice soft synths, has therefore decided to put its FireBird synth out to pasture, releasing an update and marking down the price from $79 to free […]

Windsor Hum Gets Its Own Synth, in Latest Ableton Pack; Read About Mysterious Humming

Residents of Windsor, Ontario widely report hearing a humming sound – one no one has been able to identify, but at least some claim to have recorded. And now, for the first time, you can get that hum as a synth for Ableton Live (or any other environment, via the audio files). It’s the latest […]

Reading List: The Best of the Web, from Vintage Grooveboxes to APC Sequencers to Indeterminism

There’s a beautiful river of information for electronic musicians out there, if you can only navigate its currents. In our new series, we pick out some of the best selections, since we can’t always squeeze in a full article of every terrific gem out there. It’s like a window into our inbox. And for the […]

From IKEA and Audi, Augmented Reality That's Actually Useful [Metaio]

Billy the bookcase says hello. Augmented reality has sometimes seemed like a solution in search of a problem. But two new apps suggest some degree of utility. And as Google struggles to convince people they want Google Glass, smartphones and tablets are proving just fine for occasionally overlaying visual information on an image. At top, […]