At Music Tech Fest in London last month, I gave a talk and did an afternoon-long workshop exploring ways of connecting visuals to sound. We worked with pen and paper, with patching (in Pd), with code (in Processing), and via a survey of some interesting recent work, in this case all connected to drawing. A […]

Actually, with this image, I should have made the headline “your attention is kindly requested.” The singer/producer in the UK in 2010. Photo (CC-BY-ND) blikeng – Magnus Aske Blikeng. It’s my belief that Matthew Dear is truly the electronic trouvère of this generation. Beams, from the Ghostly label he helped establish, isn’t due until the […]

Arguably, democratizing a technique is an excellent way to improve craft. (See: linear perspective in Renaissance painting.) So, why not do that with projection mapping? Here’s the latest installment. Elliot Woods of Kimchee and Chips is one of the leading practitioners of the projection-mapping arts. He also gives away a lot of his tools (see […]

Arguably, democratizing a technique is an excellent way to improve craft. (See: linear perspective in Renaissance painting.) So, why not do that with projection mapping? Here’s the latest installment. Elliot Woods of Kimchee and Chips is one of the leading practitioners of the projection-mapping arts. He also gives away a lot of his tools (see […]

Remember me? Peak in its last release had a cleaner look, but I imagine something like this is what popped to mind when you heard Peak. Photo (CC-BY) Chas Redmond. Peak is dead; long live Peak. Small music tool makers don’t always last forever, the victim of any number of circumstances that can cause them […]

Users of Ableton Live, among other tools, have a dilemma. A touch display like the iPad is really good at simple triggering and interactive displays – navigating Live’s grid of clips, for instance. It gives you visual feedback without having to hunch behind your laptop, and it makes seeing (and touching) clips far easier. But […]

Once a novel technique, the likes of which could land you a gig, projection mapping is fast evolving into a fundamental skill every visual artist must have. It’s the ability to work not only with your content, but to be creative with its delivery, almost as much as something as basic as an alpha blend […]

Once a novel technique, the likes of which could land you a gig, projection mapping is fast evolving into a fundamental skill every visual artist must have. It’s the ability to work not only with your content, but to be creative with its delivery, almost as much as something as basic as an alpha blend […]

“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 […]