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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]