Philips Thinks We Want a Giant Wave of LED Panels, Controlled By iPad – And They’re Correct

LivingSculpture 3D module system from WHITEvoid on Vimeo. Visualism has gone far beyond just projection. Lighting continues to dazzle, blurring the lines between the image, object, pixel, and display, as LED panels produce new three-dimensional forms and animation. In a spectacular project for lighting giant Philips, Berlin-headquarted White Void, the interactive shop led by Christopher […]

In Percussive Harmonies, A Record of a Year of Travel – Literally, on a Record [MeeBlip + Location Data]

Photos courtesy the artist. We have data in pictures, we have data in Facebook posts – why not data as music? In the latest data sonification project, the record of travel becomes an oddly-beautiful set of percussive harmonies. And it’s a “record” in every sense: artist and composer Brian House not only composes the data […]

In Drifting Circles, Ambient Patterns Off the Grid: Sona on iPad, a New Take on Simon

Sona iPad App ECAL/Ruslan Gaynutdinov from ECAL on Vimeo. Like animated graphic scores, software interface is becoming a palette for musical experimentation. Sona is latest, beautiful combination of interface design, musical composition and visualization, and ambient instrument. You’ve seen works like this before, naturally, but this one – recalling the off-the-grid patterns of ambient master […]

Game Boy Graphics, in Monochrome, Become The Canvas of a Music Video (Get the Tape!)

Play enough Game Boy – as some of you may have done in your childhood (or recently) – and you could start to dream in washed-out grayscale pixels. Artist David Stoll sends a music video that seems to emerge from that dream. David – aka The Beep – tells us this creation is “a demake […]

Matmos: New Music, Parapsychological Experiments, Sensory Deprivation Goggles, Irish Covers

It’s a fitting way to honor computer music: Matmos produced an electronic reimagining of computer pioneer Alan Turing’s favorite tune, the Irish traditional song “Molly Malone.” The results are haunting, made more so by Mr. Turing’s untimely demise and unjust prosecution for his open homosexuality. (According to legend, he played it on violin to the […]

Music Recommendations, Man or Machine? In Pete Tong App, a Bit of Both

It probably doesn’t occupy the daily thoughts of normal people, this question of how music recommendations will work in the future. But go to trendy “future of music” conferences and panels and the like, and you’ll hear from countless prognosticators consumed by the dilemma. Many of the solutions amount to clever algorithms, machine solutions to […]

Nintendo DS, Transformed Into an Awesome, Programmable Chip Music Instrument

This can be a guitar. Or a DX7. You can grab the code for one app – or, if you know BASIC, write your own. Photo (CC-BY) MIKI Yoshihito. For years, lovers of chip music and handheld instruments have hacked Nintendo gaming systems to turn them into music instruments. In fact, long before anyone in […]

Little White Box: A Look at the Ambitious Kinektron Music-Making Cube

How much music making can you pack into a space-age, sealed white box? Developers Kinektron proposed one solution last month. To examine their design direction so far, we turn to Create Digital Music’s summer intern in industrial design, Arvid Jense. Arvid is completing unique dual studies in Media Music (at the ArtEZ Conservatorium, Enschede) and […]

Synth of the Weekend: Fatduino is Sequenced Homebrew Goodness [Fat Man + Arduino]

There are wonderful oddities of synth creation breeds out there in the wild — strange, one-of-a-kind birds with three wings and forked duck-bills and other oddities. They might not all be practical for more than their creator, but like evolutionary anomalies, some adaptation or design feature might well make it into other productions – all […]

Animation for Games, Fanciful and Surreal, by Mario von Rickenbach [Unity]

Zurich-based artist Mario von Rickenbach is a fine representation of what the new generation of visualists looks like. Adept in code and art alike, turning his talents in illustration beyond pretty pictures to experimental game design, he’s part of a breed of artists who expresses visual ideas in interactive, live form. Those real-time game engines […]