If you think live visual performance doesn’t attract the kind of passion that indie music production does, you might need to think again. I’m writing from Rome and the latest installment of the Live Performers Meeting (LPM), a massively-epic international gathering of artists now in its eleventh year. Over 500 individual artists are here just […]

Don’t fret. An iPad can open up new ways of touching musical ideas. What if you could touch sound more directly, using sophisticated sensing to play between most common notes – even with hundreds of levels of microtonal pitch? Cantor lets you do just that – and it’s here now, proving that Apple will indeed […]

For creative coders, OpenFrameworks has been a godsend, taking the gnarly power of C++ and making it accessible to artists and designers, some of whom might never have touched code. It’s unlocking a lot of the amazing work we see, from interactive design to Kinect hacks. (See Gallery, above. This week, OpenFrameworks added a 0071 […]

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately that run something like this: free and open source tools shouldn’t just be shown for the sake of it. They should be better – demonstrably so. Here’s the funny thing: free software advocates are often the people nodding in agreement. And in some cases, they can blow your […]

Behind this tech are some essential building blocks. And the vendor of one of those, a key component in the touchscreen, has some news next week. Photo (CC-BY) Ken Hawkins. Let’s do some quick math: put together the first maker of a consumer multi-touch product (also the first real multi-touch music product), and one of […]

Hey, why the heck not? (CC-BY-SA) farnea. Imagine connecting to MIDI gadgets – inputs and outputs – and sequencing musical patterns from a browser. (As a developer, imagine doing that from JavaScript. As a user, imagine doing that right inside your browser window with a music app.) For now, such things exist only on a […]

In “Addictions,” screens explode with glitchy, vibrating textures and faces become deconstructed masses, propped up in fetish-like guises and interlaced movement. We’re witnessing the work of Paola Rocchetti, who sends over examples and showreels that easily qualify as this week’s animated inspiration. Her work extends from motion and animation into the more traditional realms of […]

In their lonely, intimate single “Pillatu,” the Chile-based duo of Vicente Espinoza and Alfredo Duarte offer some haunting music-making. Entitled El Gato, la Virgen & el Diablo (“the cat, the virgin, and the devil”), the artists are also making a kind of multimedia presentation of the work. Thanks to these CDM readers for sending in […]

Synths meet monkeys. Photo: Andreas Tilliander. Composer and Swedish dance music maestro Håkan Libdo has been a constant source of experimentation. But his latest project yields zoo-like new adventurousness. Six species of monkeys are equipped with synthesizers to test the question of whether playing a synth is really playing music – or if it’s so […]

Features come and features go. As upgrades go, Traktor 2.5 has plenty to recommend it – plus, it’s free for current Traktor 2 users, meaning you probably don’t need anyone’s advice to try it out. So, then, the question is: will tools mean that the DJ gigs you hear be any different? There’s nothing wrong […]