Take a good, long look at your computer screen. Now imagine you can’t see it. That’s the reality Mandy Matz is facing. At age 36, she’s losing her vision to glaucoma. The musician and multimedia artist makes some beautiful, ethereal music, having cut her teeth on Buzz. Listen to the haunting “Alpha Waves,” her first […]
Music
In Tbilisi, music is on pause because democracy is on the line
Music Stories October 25, 2024
In music video, Lebanese duo Rust captures emotions of “Diaspora”
Music October 11, 2024
Push, In-Depth Test: What’s it Like Playing The New Hardware from Ableton?
When Ableton Live was first released over ten years ago, it was labeled a “sequencing instrument.” The radical idea was that you could “play” your production tool, which had (and has) big implications in studios, at home, and onstage. “Playing” with a mouse and keyboard is unsatisfying for most, so even that relatively primitive first […]
Ableton Releases Live 9, Push Preorder; Watch Live-streamed Push Tutorials
Ableton has just launched their new site with Live 9 available for purchase and download, and the new Push hardware available for preorder. If you’re an existing Live user logged into your user account, you’ll see upgrade options for the software. Push can be preordered direct online, and Ableton has for the first time announced […]
What Does it Mean to Be an Electronic Instrument?
The electronic music analog to visual media’s question “is it art?” is clear. “Is it really a musical instrument?” Ableton will this week officially launch its Push hardware with Live 9; we’ll have an online exclusive review alongside that release. I know that the company is fond of calling it an “instrument.” For a profile […]
Watch: Live Performances at the Edge from Tarik Barri and Others, MusicMakers Berlin
mmakers kantine ctm from CDM on Vimeo. The ubiquitous glow of laptop screens hiding mysterious performances, the anonymous DJ looming above a crowd like a priest … if “live” music isn’t doing it for you, we bring glad tidings. There are many, many artists doing it differently. We got a chance to showcase just some […]
Hap to Make VJs Happy: Codec Looks Better, Plays Faster on GPU, Free [Mac]
Hap as in happy sounds about right. Hap is a family of free and open source video codecs for Mac OS X. The notion is that the computer’s GPU – rather than CPU – does the heavy lifting of decoding frames. Because GPUs are optimized for lots of parallel operations in a way CPUs are […]
Massive Veg Attack: Makey Makey + Fruits, Vegetables = Music
Pianos made of apples are becoming, suddenly, commonplace. Photo (CC-BY) Pete Prodoehl. Call it a massive attack of fruits and veg. Simple circuits have long been able to make use of sensors in real-world stuff like apples or JELL-O. But Make Makey deserves special credit for making interfacing those circuits with a computer silly-simple. (The […]
Vio for iOS: Transform, Tune, Harmonize Vocals in a Cloud of Particles [Preview]
Vocal modification is a natural app for iOS, yet a lot of the offerings out there are complicated to use. (At least one that springs to mind has options for add-on purchases that can muddle the user experience.) Audiofile Engineering (via a new brand, Square B) has just released an app that looks like loads […]
A Delicate Web in White Lasers: Robert Henke's 'Fragile Territories'
Mastery of technology need not be an end in itself, a showcase for mechanical sophistication. It can mean finding the point at which you push a medium to be its most expressive. And I suppose that’s why so many can admire the ongoing work of musician and media artist Robert Henke. The lasers in ‘Fragile […]
A Delicate Web in White Lasers: Robert Henke’s ‘Fragile Territories’
Mastery of technology need not be an end in itself, a showcase for mechanical sophistication. It can mean finding the point at which you push a medium to be its most expressive. And I suppose that’s why so many can admire the ongoing work of musician and media artist Robert Henke. The lasers in ‘Fragile […]