Before any explanation, perhaps you should listen. This is what some British listeners will hear as they tune into what they think will just be everyday national radio programming. Suffice to say, something will sound a bit off: Artist Christian Marclay is the person responsible for the work, the first of five such commissions in […]

The piano is a conventional grand, but with digital interface and camera, the composer is separated from it by air, playing without touching. It’s a Theremin interface for a keyboard instrument. Piano post-modern? Gestural post-digital? Whatever it is, in a work composer Benjamin Martinson composed for player piano, computer, and Kinect camera, the piano work […]

iOS now offers lots of options for using apps together, but – that’s part of the problem. The solutions are piecemeal. There’s inter-app MIDI. There’s Audiobus, which does audio, but requires the purchase of a separate app. Then you need something else for sharing data. And something else for sync. Confused yet? (Hey, it’s easy, […]

As umbrellas scurry about like spiders, inanimate metal objects scuttling through emptied streets, and electronics send clicks and crackles between robots, Peoplemeter produces a post-apocalyptic world without humans. Microscopes and endoscopes shoot these objects in revelatory ways, as the musical score amplifies their sounds. These objects are animated through various effects, ranging from stop motion […]

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world of mapping. Mapping as a technique can be accomplished in any tool, and its use predated specific end-user tools by a number of years. But 2013 seems the year that the ubiquitous MadMapper will see some serious competition as other tools specifically move in on its turf, with […]

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world of mapping. Mapping as a technique can be accomplished in any tool, and its use predated specific end-user tools by a number of years. But 2013 seems the year that the ubiquitous MadMapper will see some serious competition as other tools specifically move in on its turf, with […]

It’s been a long time coming, to say the least. But you can be sure that even when Propellerhead do something as basic as MIDI output, they’ll do it in, well, a Reason way. So, it was intriguing to hear Reason was adding MIDI out precisely because in Reason it’s integrated with virtual patch cords […]

Bars and beats are great. But people find applications for sound and music that go beyond traditional tools. That has already made Ableton Live a popular choice for triggering audio events and the like. But even Live tends to be biased toward conventional musical time. Sound and multimedia shop Aconica rolled their own tool to […]

Hang about. I may have given away the punchline in the headline, and now there’s not much more to say. “Hey, is there a plug-in out there that I can just switch on and visualize music with?” I can’t count the number of times I get asked this. That could make the following a very […]

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: manipulating sound presets should be as intuitive and powerful as regulating plasma coolant flow to the antimatter injector on a warp drive nacelle. I mean, knobs? How quaint. COSMOSƒ is a graphical morphing engine for sound, a standalone synthesizer with a wild, sci-fi interface. […]