He’s been called the father of disco. He has Oscars for Top Gun, Flashdance, and Midnight Express. (Impressive with or without Oscars.) And he scored the epic of 80s youth childhood, The Never-Ending Story – and the original Battlestar Galactica. He’s worked with Bowie, and Freddy Mercury, and Blondie. He’s a pioneer in composing for […]

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, high in the rafters, there’s a set of unusually-cheap seats called the Score Desk section. There, in addition to the seating, panels of wood are oversized enough to accommodate full-orchestral scores. While leaning over the railing to see the performance (the section is not for those with fear […]

TRI▲NGLE (Full Version) from Grace Nayoon Rhee on Vimeo. It’s not new, but it’s worth taking an occasional break from the Digital Motion for something inspiring that was animated on paper. “Triangles” by South Korean/American artist Grace Nayoon Rhee is chillingly-beautiful, a roughly-drawn trip through surreal worlds. The smudges on the paper can be simultaneously […]

Sometimes, it can be quicker and more expressive to simply patch together what you want from basic building blocks, rather than wrangle with something built for a specific purpose. And that explains the ongoing appeal of modular software environments. Audulus is an elegant, efficient modular environment on the Mac. It’s not as deep or broad […]

In this corner, the computer: dynamic, networked. In this corner, the trained human musician: still, in fact, very much able to read scores. Combining those two technologies – human and machine – has been surprisingly limited. That’s why OSCNotation, while a very simple app, is an intriguing glimpse into the future of the score. Normally, […]

So, we can’t talk more about Ableton Live 9 at the moment, and it seems Ableton has worked out how to use their YouTube settings. But at least one intrepid Live fan has shared the identity of the beautiful mixing desk you saw in the leaked Live 9 video from the weekend. This mixer also […]

As various readers have pointed out to CDM, a video entitled “Live 9 Device Master” has leaked online. (One user posted screen grabs while it was up, embedded above.) It seems fairly obvious what this video implies. Ahem. Oddly, whereas these kind of leaks often come from distributors or other third parties, it appears in […]

For just a moment, take your mind somewhere a bit different. First, imagine the computer as part of nature, not something separate from nature. And then, put your head inside the mind of a bee. (You might not want to operate heavy machinery, just in case you start to imagine you’re seeing things through a […]

How do you prefer to compose? Pen and manuscript paper? Recording ideas from a piano? Firing up your favorite music software? How about … coding in 65c816 Assembly language? The trio behind this video prefers the latter, more intensive approach, to get close to the chip hardware by communicating directly with the Super NES. It’s […]

Now that DJ tools do a lot of the same things, part of what would prompt you to use one is what you see. And what you see is a lot of what a DJ tool offers. Serato announced earlier this month that it was overhauling its somewhat fragmented offerings and replacing them with one […]