Mapping, Without Leaving the App: Resolume 4.1 Adds Major Internal Mapping Improvements, More

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 […]

A Symphony of Speakers, Carried By a Crowd, as Choir “Of Sleeping Birds” [Android+Geolocation]

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 […]

A Choir Made from a Chrowd: Hundreds Contribute to Charity Choir Sample Instrument

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, Short Animation, Transports You To Wondrous Underwater Alien World

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 […]

Insane Colors, Touch, Knobs: Ander’s Crazy Custom Live Controller, and Some New Music

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 […]

Tunes, in Drops of Color: Design Project Mixes Minimal Notes with Audible Hues

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 […]

Ableton Live 64-Bit Beta: How it Works, And Some Caveats

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? / […]

Sibelius Will Stay with Avid, But Sources Report Principal Sibelius Office to Close

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 […]

M-Audio, AIR Join Akai, Alesis, Numark at inMusic: Q&A With New Owners, and a Timeline

M-Audio honored its Midiman roots with an anniversary edition of their (quite useful) MIDI interface line. Photo courtesy Avid. So, you own M-Audio and/or AIR stuff. You want to know what this means as Avid sells those makers to a new owner, right? M-Audio and AIR (formerly Wizoo) this week end their time as subsidiaries […]

Credit Cards, Turned Into Musical Instruments, Sound Pretty Freaking Amazing [Video]

What sort of musical instruments can you make out of plastic credit cards? You might imagine results are limited. But with some clever use of mics, and brilliantly-simple application of time-tested ideas ranging from single-string monochords to music boxes, the results are eminently, wondrously sonorous. And the project benefits greatly from having some compositional intent […]