Hear the idea of creating a car sound, and you might imagine a sound designer working on a video game or film. Imagining that person producing a sound for an actual car could sound like a joke. But as today’s vehicles go silent – whisper-quiet electric cars to human-powered bicycles – the problem of imagining […]

Stretch out three seconds into 3,000 frames: even in our world of digital and photographic wonders, the simple ability of photography and motion to manipulate time remains magical. The lowly photobooth can still delight. Having seen Pablo Garcia’s machines earlier this week, I wanted to follow up with his “High Speed Photobooth,” which combines high-speed […]

Speaking of mechanical motion and machine drawing, in the work of Robert Howsare, vintage equipment becomes part kinetic sculpture, part machine artist. In “Drawing Apparatus,” two turntables become a generative geometric drawing machine, Spirograph-style. (See some really lovely-looking renders by this machine on the artwork project page. Via Today and Tomorrow, hat tip to portable.tv […]

(CC-BY) Axel Tregoning. (CC-BY) Marcin Wichary. Jack Tramiel, who died this week, had as deep an impact on computer music for the everyday musician as just about any computing industry pioneer. While Jobs, Woz, Moore, Grove, and Gates get a lot of the attention, Tramiel’s legacy was in making computing affordable and accessible. As such, […]

What happens when an Albrecht Dürer masterpiece meets CNC? Watch the video above to see. The work of Pittsburgh-based Pablo Garcia, who does collaborative, trans-media work and teaches at Carnegie Mellon, the project nods both to art history and the world of robotics – and it’s just one of Garcia’s works to do so.

What happens when an Albrecht Dürer masterpiece meets CNC? Watch the video above to see. The work of Pittsburgh-based Pablo Garcia, who does collaborative, trans-media work and teaches at Carnegie Mellon, the project nods both to art history and the world of robotics – and it’s just one of Garcia’s works to do so.

Mapping projections to architecture, and connecting music to visual metaphors are nothing new. But many of these projects leave the control to performers; audience members simply stand back and watch. In a project for HP promoting their TouchSmart PCs, interactive artists ceded that control to participants. Instead of the computers being in the hands of […]

This might look like Tatooine, but it’s in fact the deserts of New Mexico, where artists Biosphere and Lustmord visited this year in a musical exploration of some of America’s – and nuclear power’s – darker past. The project promises to be a highlight of Unsound in the world premiere of a new, commissioned work. […]

From top: Sarah Pease’s glass jar portable speaker design, and the David A. Mellis open source creation that inspired it. audioJar image courtesy Sarah Pease; all other images (CC-BY) David A. Mellis. Who says you can’t make your own consumer electronics? David A. Mellis, a co-creator of Arduino who now is starting a PhD in […]

When we last caught up with the touch-less, gestural music-making of composer Chris Vik, the Australian musician was sharing his own Kinectar software and playing both dubstep and ambient scores for modern dance. Now, Vik is back playing a very substantial physical instrument: Melbourne’s four story-tall, MIDI-retrofitted Town Hall Organ. Here, the Max-powered software takes […]