“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware,” said computer visionary Alan Kay in 1982. And when it comes to making computer software into something you can control physically with your hands, that has made some music tool makers look to integrated hardware for control. But music users – DJs included […]

For all the ubiquity of electronic instruments and computers in the past half century, it’s still comparatively rare for composers to add these sounds to the largely-unchanging makeup of an orchestra. Therefore, as composer Ned McGowan writes a concerto that claims to be the first for iPad, he’s forced to admit the addition of a […]

Sometimes, when you want something, you have to make it yourself – literally. The blog Music Thing, back in the day, was a favorite reason for any music tech lover to fire up the browser. Now, Tom Whitwell – whose day job at The Times of London keeps him plenty busy – is back, with […]

I’m sure you’ve gazed up at big LED screens on stadiums and convention centers and the like and said this would be a lot more fun if I could play video games on it. Developers Mode Set got to live – and share – that dream. And they didn’t stop there: they built the whole […]

Music games like Guitar Hero introduced the notion of musical instruments that scale digitally to the masses. By the time Harmonix introduced the latest version of Rock Band, complete with MIDI controllers, you are able to go from something that’s a toy to simply playing the instrument in a conventional way. The idea of scalability […]

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 […]