The Drum Machine. Warning: may materialize on unfriendly alien planets, or just in UK rock quarries. Musical tradition is, by definition, often “multi-player.” From people playing in bands and strin quartets to families getting together to sing, live performance is often shared. But while you can drop a computer player into an ensemble, the computer […]

Kaizen is the Japanese technique of continuous improvement, and that’s what we’re trying to live by daily on CDM, especially this summer, in ways you should start to notice soon. One thing readers have requested for some time is a mailing list. Now, these things are typically promotional tools I myself despise, which could explain […]

Resolume 4.1 New Features from Resolume on Vimeo. Mapping is more than just “that thing you do with a big pile of boxes or the facade of a building as a gimmick.” It’s increasingly expected that you’re ready, as a live visualist, to produce output in shapes other than just the rectangle. It might be […]

Orchestras generally sit in place, safely contained in a hall. Speakers are arranged in twos, fours, and sixes in fixed positions. Audiences sit and listen, and players play. In “Of Sleeping Birds,” those boundaries are all erased. In “Of Sleeping Birds,” dubbed “a geo-locative multi-speaker symphony,” mobile speakers held by participants form a chorus of […]

We hear a lot about the “wisdom of crowds.” Now, here’s the voice of the crowd. Photo (CC-BY) James Cridland. Every choir is, in a sense, crowd-sourced. In this case, a set of choir samples were composed from “choir members” from around the globe who never met each other. In Soniccouture’s new Chrowdchoir instrument, over […]

Ments, an audiovisual collaboration between sound creators Echoic Audio and London-based motion artist Jordi Pages, almost needs no introduction. It jacks your brain deep into the oceans of some alien world. There’s no clear narrative, but perhaps this is what Pixar narrative is like if you’re from a different solar system. Jordi offers up some […]

What if software could leap off the screen, transforming into physical form? Ander’s custom controller for live performance looks like just that. An epic array of candy-colored buttons, with a dizzying arrangement of knobs atop it, it’s the opposite of what many live performances these days can be. Rather than a spectacle that distracts from […]

Perhaps it’s the sense of detachment that comes from long hours spent staring at screens, peering into pixels and abstraction. But whatever the reason, when experimenting with design and music, creators seem increasingly drawn to simple, physical interaction. Somewhere in the mysterious play between senses, between seen color and unseen sound, they look for intuitive […]

This number “64” is important to some people making music. Here, we get to explain why, if you should even be concerned, and what it’ll mean to run Live in 64-bit. Photo (CC-BY-SA) shizhao. Sung to the tune of the Beatles’ iconic “When I’m 64 [bit]…” Do you need memory? / Lotsa more memory? / […]

Users and developers of the music notation software Sibelius have expressed concern about the software’s future, in the wake of a reorganization at the software’s owner Avid. Sibelius wasn’t singled out in the reorganization announcement, though it was mentioned in company background boilerplate on the press release as one of the key company products. CDM […]