Owners of Android phones and (if you’re out there) Android tablets have had a rough time of it as far as music apps. A lackluster market combined with inconsistent-to-awful audio performance have kept the bulk of mobile development on iOS. But if you do have an Android phone or tablet, we’ve got a beautiful app […]

Paint digitally, and animate with friends: Tagtool’s live “multiplayer” painting project has already been a live visual hit as a non-commercial project. The “DIY” version relied on custom software and a gamepad; various artists created their own hardware. Now, Tagtool has come to iPad, which makes for easier painting and broadened appeal. Tagtool had always […]

Microsoft’s Kinect has proven a compelling proof of concept for gestural control of music. But it could be just the beginning of mass-market gestural sensing technologies. The Leap Motion, like Kinect, promises to be affordable gear. Unlike the Kinect, the hardware is even more unobtrusive, and gestural control is more precise and responsive. Given the […]

Abstract three-dimensional geometries: for many, they are the best expression of the rich imagery the mind’s eye produces when listening to music. But, with a growing heap of work that uses that material, artists have to push the details and execution to connect with the music. Last year, Michel de Klein did a beautiful realization […]

Gunshop | Hoppy New Year from Gunshop on Vimeo. Create Animal Motion? Stacy Nimmo, founder and creative director of San Francisco-based motion shop Gunshop sends over their New Years’ creation. This is a bit too cute not to post. And I like nerding out about number sequences. (Composing with pitch sets this year, anyone?) As […]

The beginning of 2013 is as good a landmark as any to begin a return to music making and creativity. But the top-ten lists that crowded the Web in the last couple of weeks may not be your best guide. Instead of working out what’s “best,” we invited CDM’s music contributor Matt Earp, aka artist […]

iPad and iPhone owners got a nice gift recently. Over the Christmas holiday week, a whole slew of new iOS updates rolled in, perhaps caught in the holiday rush. Many of the improvements centered on Audiobus, a proprietary technology that, via a host app, allows iOS users to connect different apps for input, recording, and […]

The lava lamp has entered a whole new age, courtesy multiple projection processes, and a special kind of industrial aluminum with the fanciful name “bubblesheet.” New work by Austrian-born, London-based Roland Lindner and Diane Karner aka decollage.tv ripples and oozes, transporting us to a world from some psychedelic, molten-plasma corner of the galaxy. Set to […]

This isn’t like any Hurdy-Gurdy you’ve seen or heard before. Derek Holzer’s optoelectronic Tonewheels Hurdy-Gurdy is a combination of mechanical, optical, and electronic elements, part sculpture and part instrument. It recalls vintage mechanical and optical instruments, but with a sound that is decidedly modern and strange. In the translation, something wonderful happens: this becomes a […]

Windows PCs are from Mars, Macs are from Venus, Windows VST plug-ins won’t ever run on the Mac — wait, not so fast. Ornament Uncle writes with a solution for running Windows VSTs on the Mac as if they were native plug-ins. The tutorial describes a fairly meticulous process – if you’re expecting this to […]