Minneapolis-based artist Patrick Flanagan is no ordinary drummer or electronic musician. His rig does everything the hard way – and the results are fantastic. With robotic drum kit mechanically playing acoustic drums, his fingers command complex feats of rhythm and melody from an oversized, custom grid controller. There are idiomatic musical possibilities unlocked by software […]
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Color and Light: Gestures Manipulate Music, RGB Lights [Ableton + Kinect]
Motion, light & sound / Kinect & Madlight from things happen on Vimeo. In a teaser video just released by Spain’s Things Happen, a silhouetted performer uses arm position to sweep through RGB colors and trigger sound cues. It’s the latest effort to integrate the immersive media environment with a performer’s body, part spectacle, part […]
The Pleasure of Sound: Human Experience is Weird; Electronic Sounds Help
Human experience is weird; it’s full of wonder – and it’s also full of fear. The sounds, for me, should also evoke that. Jad Abumrad From reading online, electronic music as a scene seems in a nasty sort of malaise, ranging from existential angst over everything from genre popularity to gender issue crises and pessimistic […]
FL Studio 11: Play it with Touch and Everything and Everywhere, Live or Editing
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 […]
Melodies in Triangles: Christopher Willits on Playing Grids of Push [Tutorial Video]
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 […]
Discover Music, Get Free Samples and Live Packs, Get Your Ocarina On
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 […]
Behind the Veil: Reznor's How To Destroy Angels Makes Poetry in Light
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 […]
Behind the Veil: Reznor’s How To Destroy Angels Makes Poetry in Light
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 […]
From Gestures to MIDI: Geco Promises Music Applications for Leap Motion
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 […]
Personal Data Visualization: loci Makes 3D-Printed Sculptures from Your Air Travel [Max/MSP]
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 – […]