Happy 2013, everyone! Here’s CDM with the latest news. It seems there’s a new synth called the Korg MS-20! Or you can have a monosynth with filter saturation – that arrangement of three oscillator knobs looks cool. All of these things use a ground-breaking format called MIDI that allows digital instruments to talk to one […]

We’re spoiled by modern software as a canvas for experimental sound. Significantly, once constructed and encapsulated, these digital sound devices can fall away, allowing you to explore new noise frontiers through play, not only through calculated sound design. (That very question has come up in very different conversations with developers I’ve had in the last […]

Today, the 11th of March, is the one hundredth anniversary of “The Art of Noises,” the seminal letter written by Italian Futurist painter Luigi Russolo. That letter became a manifesto for what was then a radical document, suggesting a new approach to sound and music. In it, Russolo cautioned that “the art of noises must […]

Native Instruments has been teasing new instrument software in recent days, and now we get to see what they were previewing: a new virtual-analog monosynth and a remade version of their drum sampler. But, hold on, before everyone yawns and leaves the building – there’s reason to pay attention to this news. First, yes, there […]

Ardour has long been software that you probably wanted to want to use. Fully free and open source, supporting standards for plug-ins and file interchange, Ardour is software that arguably the whole industry needs to exist. That is, even if you don’t use it, you might benefit from having a reasonable competitor that pushes openness […]

Let’s not leave this discussion on the 100th International Women’s Day with only words. One commenter noted that they had no female producers in their library. Now that means your library is almost certainly missing some important music. From Electric Indigo, founder of femalepressure (whose report was in today’s story), comes a mix of a […]

Announcing their findings in a wide variety of languages, femalepressure, a 56-country network representing hundreds of women in music from bookings to DJing, have put the electronic music scene into numbers. In a report formally released today, they quantify the sinking suspicion that labels, festivals, and media outlets are badly lacking in female representation. Just […]

Articulated Fabric from Francis Bitonti Studio on Vimeo. Architects regularly theorize about 3D printing and a move to architecture that’s more fluid and flexible. But just what would that look like? This report today gives us a glimpse. The designer: Michael Schmidt, NYC The architect/3D research studio: Francis Bitonti, Brooklyn For Dita Von Teese, burlesque […]

Left to right, beginning to end, the same in a loop — there’s no reason music has to work this way once you’ve got a computer. But if you associate generative or algorithmic music with some sort of magical black box machine you switch on, an automaton spitting out notes while you sip tea and […]

Electronic Beats, the editorial project sponsored by a certain major mobile carrier in Germany, has been doing extraordinary work profiling artists. (Their films are in English or have English subtitles.) The upcoming Modeselektor project, due out the 3rd of May, extends that to full-length documentary filmmaking. And the results look terrifically inspiring. But what’s significant […]