FL Studio 11 has arrived, hot on the heels of an impressive FL Studio Mobile release. The folks at Image Line have been intensely busy, but what strikes me is that you can now play FL Studio using almost anything, on almost any device. The Mobile version works on Android and touch Windows devices, not […]

You can think about melodies and harmonies in geometric shapes. In fact, instrumentalists playing piano keys or guitar frets have already been doing that for some time. What’s happening with grid controllers like Push – among other alternatives – is that it’s now easy to rearrange melodic setups to see and play these relationships in […]

Some CDM commenters accuse this site of being shills for Ableton, of giving disproportionate coverage to Ableton Live and Push. Others accuse us of being hipsters, endlessly talking about things like 8-bit video game consoles and Nintendo. And so, I’m pleased to come to you today with a 30,000 word, peer-reviewed white paper relating the […]

Amidst a forest of illuminated tubing, the band How to Destroy Angels (with Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Mariqueen Maandig, and visualist/art director Rob Sheridan) take to the stage in an abstract digital structure. The stage image is transcendent, a rectangular prism of shifting digital visuals and projected effects. Perhaps it’s best to run this by […]

Amidst a forest of illuminated tubing, the band How to Destroy Angels (with Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Mariqueen Maandig, and visualist/art director Rob Sheridan) take to the stage in an abstract digital structure. The stage image is transcendent, a rectangular prism of shifting digital visuals and projected effects. Perhaps it’s best to run this by […]

Here we go again. Touchless hand gestures have been part of electronic musical performance ever since the Theremin first hummed to life almost 100 years ago. And those gestures embody the same challenges and promise. We have the ability as humans to think spatially, in three dimensions, and to have a tight sense of control […]

Data visualization is moving from the macroeconomic and large-scale – census numbers and such – to the personal. And digital work is getting more physical. So, it’s telling to look at this latest interaction design project from Copenhagen-based creator Andrew Spitz. The sound designer-turned-interaction designer built an app in Max/MSP that pulls travel information – […]

If someone were to buy you a shopping spree, letting you roam free to stash anything you wanted in your cart, you could do worse than winding up with Schneiders Buero, the Berlin-based music gear boutique. And for records, the wonderful RoughTrade in London would easily be a top pick. Let’s combine them. That’s what […]

Gestural input is already beginning to make Kinect look crude, offering new three-dimensional sensing approaches that combine low latency with precise gestures. That offers tremendous potential for new interfaces, and could in particular finally help solve the problem of how to intuitively work with three-dimensional interface concepts that don’t lend themselves to traditional touch and […]

Alexander Chen is turning into Google’s resident composer. In his latest experiment, he uses the controversial-but-buzzed-about Google Glass wearable tech as a video source for making music. Layering together a series of loops of his solo viola playing, he weaves a contemplative, modal composition. It’s a sort of overdubbed chamber ensemble in video. (The spare, […]