“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 […]

Looking a bit like the love child of a Nintendo DS and a microKORG, the Miselu neiro is a different animal in mobile music. The upcoming device is powered by Android and has a touchscreen – a bit like a tablet – but it’s hardware dedicated to music-making, complete with a compact, piano-layout keyboard. The […]

Photo by Phillip Stearns. The link between dub music and technology is as old as the genre itself – you could even argue that dub is THE purest example of a technology expressed through music. At its best, it’s like magic – when I first saw Scientist run the board for Mikey Dread live, it […]

By the 1990s, the notion that computer software could be a means of delivering interactive digital art more personally was enjoying a Renaissance. This was the age of the Voyager CD-ROM, which catered to new multimedia PCs and Macs with titles from the likes of Laurie Anderson and Morton Subotnick, the decade in which Brian […]

For all the growth of three-dimensional mapping techniques, the surfaces are often (quite literally) dull. In Prismatica, an installation piece, the material is part of what makes the work so beautiful. Color and geometric form drip through the crystals like liquid, in a work that revolves like a modern, digital mandala, a kaleidoscopic meditation. The […]