Goodies for KORG monotribe, monotron, from Japanese Overlays to MIDI Mods

monotribe, in limited silver and gold. Photo by Marsha Vdovin for CDM. It’s a beautiful thing when music hardware improves with age. And lately, that’s been what’s happening to Korg’s monotribe and monotron. Over the past few months, we’ve seen a major update from Korg for the monotribe that makes its sequencing functions easier and […]

PONK: Touchless Air Hockey, with Kinect + Flash, Groovy '80s Neon Graphics

Enough gimmick. Let’s get down to serious business, the stuff that illuminates our life and gives us a deeper sense of humanity. Yes, I mean air hockey. Yes, I’m dead serious. (Hey, I’m a fan.) In a brilliant – and brilliantly-colored – new project, the power of computer vision reinvents a familiar tabletop game. Live-animated […]

PONK: Touchless Air Hockey, with Kinect + Flash, Groovy ’80s Neon Graphics

Enough gimmick. Let’s get down to serious business, the stuff that illuminates our life and gives us a deeper sense of humanity. Yes, I mean air hockey. Yes, I’m dead serious. (Hey, I’m a fan.) In a brilliant – and brilliantly-colored – new project, the power of computer vision reinvents a familiar tabletop game. Live-animated […]

Circle, Triangle, Square Celebrate Dublab, Future Roots Radio in Brilliant Shorts

In splashes of groovy texture, three shorts by director Elliott Sellers from late last year celebrate Dublab, the Los Angeles non-profit Web radio collective. They’re doubly worth mentioning – both for the geometric, swinging video goodness of the video, and as a window into the energy behind LA’s Dublab radio. For his part, Elliott Sellers […]

Last Chance to Help Moog Foundation Teach Art of Sound Science in Schools; Why it Matters

Science and art, physics and music, come together and come alive in one place. You know where. Photo (CC-BY) Mikael Altemark. We’re here today not just because people like synths, or electronic music, or even music itself, but because the advancement of technology depends on kids learning about science and math. That was certainly the […]

Voice Messages Become 3D Paper Waveform Sculptures: Paper Note

Instead of writing on paper, a sound executed in paper in three dimensions. All images courtesy the artists. Speaking of making the ephemeral tangible, as artist Andrew Spitz tells us, “it’s a fun process to map something that is so fleeting as a sound to a physical object.” That’s what he does in a new […]

The Hand-Cranked, Antique MIDI Sequencer (High-Res Images, Details)

Music, ephemeral and fleeting, to many of us wants tangible embodiment, some physical sense of the tug we feel from its unseen vibrations. We’ve regularly featured the image of the circle as a sequence; even as music software prefers left-to-right piano rolls and scores and tracks, it’s a logical shape. Here, Finnish sound artist Martin […]

FL Studio Unveils Performance Mode Alpha; Live That Isn’t Like Ableton Live?

If you’re looking for a way of triggering sounds in live performance, but you want to meld that notion with the sequencer rather than play a drum machine-style sampling instrument, your commercially-available options are limited. And it seems, in particular, new creations simply work the way Ableton Live’s Session View does. Bitwig, a new DAW, […]

CREATED: Call it VHSwave — Jacob 2-2, Stephen Farris and Music That Looks Back Through Time

Futuristic technologies, now found … in the past. Maybe that explains the sound of a lot of new music, says CDM contributor Matt Earp. Photo (CC-BY-NC-SA) ReallyBoring. What happens as music peers through the gauze of memory? Our contributor Matt Earp asks that question with the second installment of the new series, CREATED, a column […]

Dance Technology: Proximity, with VDMX, Quartz Composer, OpenFrameworks, Syphon

With new hybrid performance comes new hybrid tools, as artists can work with an arsenal of evolving, often open, creative visual software. In a new performance for Australian Dance Theater, multiple tools merge to produce an array of visual features to accompany the choreography. Some of the glue is Syphon, the open source framework for […]