Mapping Festival Issues 2013 Call for Works; Mapping Festival in Videos

Mapping Festival 2011 – Video documentation trailer from mappingfestival on Vimeo. Mapping Festival 2012 – Teaser from mappingfestival on Vimeo. Mapping Festival is simply one of the highest-quality festival venues for innovative visual work. Beyond just what “mapping” itself would describe, it’s consistently been a terrific filter for what Ilan Katin describes so eloquently in […]

Avid’s Sibelius Scoring Tool Marches On, But Without Its Creators, As Users Protest

As industry giant Avid reorganizes, user fears about the future of popular notation tool Sibelius continue to mount. The chief rival to MakeMusic’s Finale, Sibelius is widely used among composers, musicians, arrangers, engravers, and educators. Those users now fear not a dead Sibelius, sold off to some other party, but an undead tool. In this […]

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 […]

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 […]