Perhaps part of what you need for laptop music to evolve into an appreciated live performance art medium is simply time. Finnish artist Sasu Ripatti is a good candidate for mastery of the form. Honing his production and performance skills since the late 90s, he’s become a maestro of digital music. Moments in his music […]

Ivory tower, let down your hair. Make no mistake. The slightly-impossible-to-pronounce acronym CCRMA (“karma”), standing for the not-terribly-sexy “Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics,” is one of the world’s hotbeds for innovation in electronic music. From the lowest-level DSP code to the craziest live performances, this northern California research center nesting at Stanford […]

Standuino π [pi] synced with frauAngelico + microGranny from standuino on Vimeo. Once the stuff of noise art oddity — isolated electronic experiments staying mostly on the test table — the DIY instrument is starting to find friends and form ensembles. And so it is that Czech instrument design mad scientists Standuino have assembled a […]

4 ways to sync VDMX and Ableton Live from Studio Rewind on Vimeo. Frequently asked question? Maybe incessantly-asked question. Live performers simply want a way to have more intimate relationships between music and visuals onstage. That means whether they’re working solo or with a live visualist, being able to get useful signal between music and […]

In the exciting world of Things That Aren’t An iPhone, Moog Music have announced, out of the blue, a version of their popular Animoog synth for BlackBerry Z10. Animoog for BlackBerry Z10 In a tweet to CDM, Moog Music reflected, “The more creative tools artists have the more music the world will have.” I couldn’t […]

What if patching, as on screen, involved physical unit generators you could connect with cables? KK Chau sends this project that answers that question. It’s modular at the lowest possible level – each box with one or two knobs, doing just one thing. And the sound? The sound is … uh, awful, actually. In a […]

Call it laser mapping. Melbourne-based artist Jayson Haebich has rendered in thin air, literally, architectural forms in color. He uses custom software to map lasers through particles to produce an ephemeral sculpture of air. The results are gorgeous – frozen digital motion. From his description: These are a series of static light sculptures that have […]

Out today, Arpeggionome is the iPhone follow-up to an iPad grid instrument, making lovely, elegant cascades of notes from a screen full of circles. The work of San Francisco-based electrical engineer Alexander Randon, it’s especially nice to see not just the app itself, but the music the developer makes with his own tool. Watch the […]

Take your visual app. Take a parameter. Now control it with timelines and automation – anything, anywhere. The appeal is clear for visualists, particularly with built-in options sometimes limited. Now, sequencing control – clocked to MIDI – can take on powerful new dimensions. Vezér isn’t the first app to go this direction, by any means. […]

CDM and yours truly team up with Berlin arts collective Mindpirates next week for a learning event we hope will be a little different than most. The idea behind the gathering is to combine learning in some new ways. The evenings begin with more traditional instruction, as I cover, step-by-step, how you’d assemble beat machines, […]