Say “MPC,” and what comes to mind is a big, solid piece of hardware – a pickup truck of a drum machine, all metal beneath its rubber pads. And yet, a whole lot of what an MPC can do is now on your phone. Akai’s iMPC is available now for the iPhone. At a US$2.99 […]

Musical instruments remain some of the best ways to learn about the wonders of electronics, physics, and more. Our friends at Make are showing that off with a week of DIY projects at what they’re calling Maker Camp 2013. Staged in Google+ Hangouts, so anyone can participate. Friday’s guests include some of our favorite electronic […]

Vezer vs CoGe circuit bended MIDI from vargasz abolcs on Vimeo. Last week, we saw Vezér, an application for visual control with an elegant timeline interface. We asked what you were doing it – and here’s one example. Creator Vargasz Abolcs calls it “MIDI circuit bending.” The notion: use control messages to make visual events […]

Apple, Steinberg, Cakewalk, and others have begun adding audio manipulation tools to their DAW, and some of those tools are decent enough in a pinch. But there still isn’t any one application – as a plug-in or built into a DAW – that offers the amount of audio tweaking powers as Celemony’s Melodyne products. The […]

Tunnels – Currents New Media Festival 2013 from jake snider on Vimeo. Pixels and vectors aside, visualism is work in light. And so, it’s refreshing to see work as direct and evocative as that sent to CDM by reader Jake Snider. It makes interacting with light the centerpiece of the work. It’s visceral, sensual, and […]

The days in which digital DJing meant simulating vinyl seem to be steadily coming to a close, replaced with new notions of the digital deck. That’s not to say digital vinyl control is going away – it’s just fading in popularity, replaced by systems that are more reliable, more flexible, and frankly, more organically related […]

There just isn’t a season of the year where music making can’t entertain you. But once upon a time, music technology woefully confined its producers to windowless, underground lairs established as dusty academic laboratories. No more. Now you can toss everything in a backpack, head to the Finnish countryside, and put on a barbecue while […]

VJ app makers are routinely profiling their customers, but this particular case studio deserves extra mention. (And not just because the DJs apparently wear wings there – time to up our game.) At New Delhi, India’s Kitty Su, classroom/business mirror projectors allowed extreme short throw — a stunningly-short 10″ (25 cm) — resolving the shadows […]

There are few artists as thoroughly credentialed across dance music and Classical new music as Cristian Vogel. But what’s astounding about Vogel is, having ventured out on the precipice of those bleeding edges of both worlds, he still stands on tiptoe there now. Chilean-born, UK-raised and academically-trained in the 80s, and now a leading voice […]

What if you would strip away the latest fashions, the murky layers of effects and gimmicks, and just get out to the otherworldly pleasure of listening to machines transport you into outer-space grooves? The solo debut of Detroit-based artist Erika, Hexagon, could give you just that liberating feeling. It’s arrestingly minimal in its materials, not […]