Eye Vapor EEG Sonification 1 from Derivative on Vimeo. Smart. Even smart enough to visualize and sonify EEGs. TouchDesigner is not well-known in general circles, even after long-running availability. It’s Windows-only software for specialists. But there’s only one thing you need to know about it: it is consistently used in some of the best work […]

The Bug, indeed. If you could insert Kevin Martin like a data glitch into the music scene and watch the wonderfully-corrupted results, you wouldn’t be too far off. (See the datamoshed music video below for a visual representation.) Under the name The Bug, or as GOD, Techno Animal, Ice, Curse of the Golden Vampire, Pressure, […]

Sometimes, there are designs that seem almost impossibly like an answer to a specific need. Let us illustrate. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a box that you could play, independent of a computer, that just let you mess about with samples directly from an SD card? And wouldn’t it be nice if it had […]

The Black Dog are titans of experimental techno and house, with a long record to match. (We reviewed – and praised – their latest album, Tranklements.) But you may not associate them with manufacturing hardware. As the landscape of crowd-funded music hardware grows, though, that’s exactly the venture they’re now willing to take, as the […]

That’s one small step for DJ hardware, one giant leap into the post-PC era. Native Instruments today has updated their integrated hardware for Traktor DJs, the 4-channel Traktor Kontrol S4 and 2-channel Traktor Kontrol S2. But while the updates are nice, the biggest transformation is that you can watch a DJ working with these controllers […]

It shows up on a standard (Teletext) television. It turns your remote control into a music interface. It makes glitching rhythmic music from sounds – even re-sampling bits of your TV. And then it prints your musical patterns. That’s the wild, far-out project concocted by chip artist goto80. The result is a “tracker, artificial intelligence, […]

ArKaos’ GrandVJ live visual software is now in a major upgrade and out of beta, with a companion mapping module alongside. Some readers – largely those loyal to rival tools – have responded that the number “2” after GrandVJ left them wanting more substantial changes. But this isn’t a radical update – not in visible […]

A research presentation from SIGGRAPH has been spreading quickly online, demonstrating just how seamlessly we might soon transform two-dimensional photography into three-dimensional objects. Perhaps what makes the “3-Sweep” technique so impressive is that it doesn’t represent some sort of computational breakthrough, or algorithmic trickery. It’s simply good, inventive design. And it allows human and machine […]

From being a long-time mainstay of the Detroit scene to, at last, debuting a proper solo LP with Hexagon Cloud, the one word that can sum up Erika for me is, simply, “inspiring.” And if Hexagon Cloud’s perfectly-calibrated analog sounds and imaginative musical frequencies indulge our futuristic sonic fantasies, here we get the chance to […]

Electronic instruments really are becoming like folk instruments. US$42 now buys you a small board that you can touch directly, one that’s immediate and from which anyone can coax sounds. You can jam with it, pocket it; it’s affordable and direct and playable. And it all fits in a plastic cassette tape box. The re-released […]