Pioneer, that best-known brand of DJ hardware, wants you to use hardware alongside software. And they’re uttering the word “remix” rather than “DJ.” And they have something that really doesn’t look like a CDJ, so much as a remote control for a spaceship carrying CDJs. It seems to be something of a trend. We saw […]

Francis Prève works the crowd. Photo courtesy the artist. The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out. Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of […]

Austin comes into view. Photo (CC-BY) David Berkowitz. Okay, I may be in Germany (see you next week, Messe!), but if you’re in Austin, Texas, the CDM radar is picking up some strong blips of things you probably want to be doing, starting today, Do. 15 Mär. (Erm, uh, sorry, Thursday March 15!) Highlights include […]

Adding pads to a digital DJ setup: here, the new Kontrol F1 hardware, with its colored matrix of pads, nestles in between more conventional mixers and decks. Image courtesy Native Instruments. Native Instruments had already revealed that it would add new hands-on remixing capabilities to its flagship DJ hardware and software line. But today, we […]

“Can a game move me?” That’s the deceptively-simple quandary posed by producer Robin Hunicke of thatgamecompany on the eve of the release of their new PS3 title, Journey. But it’s a serious question, one that lies at the heart of all we do in creating digital music and motion. I often have conversations with other […]

What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free […]

Too much comment here will spoil the fun, so enjoy – particularly with Dubstep how-to videos becoming, bizarrely, some of the most viral things online. (Hmmm… it’s almost like kids are interested in producing a wildly-popular music genre. Strange. But I hope you’ll stick around for CDM’s new Csound Drones That Hurt Your Ears series, […]

If you were lucky enough to gaze into the northern skies above Earth last week, you might have seen a spectacular light show, as a solar storm bombarded the planet’s atmosphere and lit up the Aurora Borealis. A humble digital reflection of that phenomenon, the Aurora Dress brings sparkling, colored effects in LEDs to something […]

Adorn your iPhone with audio, courtesy 3D printers Shapeways and an unusual use of the SoundCloud API to get at the data. The content we watch on the Internet is, ultimately, just data. We view that data in fairly narrow, conventional ways, but there’s no reason that has to be the limit. In one of […]

Digital artist and imagineer Memo Akten, known for beautiful work like his dazzling, sparkling open source fluid library, has lately turned his attention to intersections of visual motion and musical pattern. In a series of etudes, he applies simple, sinusoidal motion to musical patterning. That is, as abstract waves flow on the screen, they trigger […]