Hand Puppetry: “Fine” by Virgilio Villoresi is Literally Handmade Motion; Shifting Perspective

“Fine” is a delightful, poignant short film by Italian filmmaker (and CDM reader) Virgilio Villoresi. It tells, says its creator, the story of the “birth, life and death of a soldier, represented on a hand (mine).” No, there’s nothing especially digital about this – but also nothing stopping you from using this kind of minimalism […]

Dead Frogs Dancing: A MIDI-Controlled, Underwater, Reanimated Frog Ballet (Creepy)

Take MIDI remote control, electrical impulses fed to the twitching corpses of dissected frogs, and add water. What you get? Creepy-as-hell “zombie frog ballet,” in a work sent to us by a reader. The work of Shanghai, China artist LuYang (apparently now living in Japan), you can at least take comfort in the fact that […]

MeeBlip SE: Making Our Open Synth Hardware Better, More Available, Starting Now

The original vision of the MeeBlip was to make something affordable, something open and hackable, something anyone could get, something that could tell a story, and something we’d use to make some music. And since those are all goals of Create Digital Music, too, it’s a perfect physical compliment to what we do. For me, […]

Colored Cubes Light Up in Responsive DJ Stage for "The Paranormal Unicorn"

So, you probably think that you can bring out a massive array of colored LED boxes, have them pulse hypnotically to your music, and dazzle us, because we love color and light. You’re probably right. CDM reader Stefan Yazzie writes: A few friends and I created this audio-visual DJ stage to accompany our live shows. […]

Colored Cubes Light Up in Responsive DJ Stage for “The Paranormal Unicorn”

So, you probably think that you can bring out a massive array of colored LED boxes, have them pulse hypnotically to your music, and dazzle us, because we love color and light. You’re probably right. CDM reader Stefan Yazzie writes: A few friends and I created this audio-visual DJ stage to accompany our live shows. […]

From Beautiful Ambient Modern Dance to Dubstep, Gestures to Music in Kinect (Download the Tool)

It started as some compelling demos or proof of concept, but it’s plenty real now: the tools for translating movement, gesture, and dance from the body to interactive music march forward. Empowered by Microsoft’s Kinect and an artist-friendly toolchain, even a single, clever developer can do a lot. Sound designer, music producer, and Max/MSP developer […]

Stream Video and Sound Wirelessly from iOS, Android to Mac, for Performance, Recording, Screencasting

Enough of pointing cameras at iPads and iPhones and Android phones and things. Let’s use the power of these massive computers with wireless capabilities and do it wireless already. Result: screencasting your latest iOS creation (hi, developers) or getting live video from a Processing app on an Android tablet onto a VJ app running on […]

New Music Tech Web Show Takes on VJing, Audiovisual Turntablism

How do you expose live visual culture to larger audiences? Even as club visuals have become more commonplace, and – evidently – some US$10 million in gear sold last year, the awareness of the medium itself is both limited and, very often, contentious. Producer and CDM reader Yaniv Fituci sends along one new entry, a […]

FOUND Installation Plays Narration, Robotic Music with Vinyl, Unravels Truth

One perhaps unexpected impact of technology has been to change the way we think about ourselves and our experience. Recording equipment – from photography to phonograph – has given us a new sense that memory itself might be fixed, unchanging, an accurate record of an unmoving truth. Except, of course, neither the recorded object nor […]

Mobile, Smartphone Videos That Doesn't Suck: Video How-to, How it Helps

Amidst all this smartphone and iPhone hype is a simple, painful truth: a lot of us are shooting pretty poor-quality content on phones. Inadequate lighting, shaky handheld footage, and woefully-poor sound from internal mics that badly lag the improved image sensor quality all contribute. Fundamentally, the device’s lightweight, handheld, um, phone-ness work against you. Reader […]