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, […]

Summertime may conjure images of Ibiza and middle-of-the-road festivals in Europe and America, “summer jams” and the musical equivalent of the beach book. And there’s nothing wrong with that; anyone who would deny people the pleasure of listening and dancing to music they love is kind of a jerk. But this stereotype can also obscure […]

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 […]