Opponents of US SOPA Legislation Gaining Momentum on Blackout Day; Musicians Have a Stake

Photo (CC-BY-NC-SA) Dawn Loh. It’s been called, bluntly, “Internet censorship” by opponents. And now, US legislation that claims to curb piracy faces mounting challenges as that opposition grows, particularly as the White House warns it will block the bills. Today, even as a flood of delightful new music toys become available, it’s worth pausing to […]

Create Analog Motion: Hypnotic Visuals from an Oscilloscope

CUSP-a remembrance of the forgotten from michael matos on Vimeo. It’s extraordinary sometimes how much a single visual source can do, transformed into other iterations. Here’s Michael Matos, who writes: We met before at the last handmade music gathering … since then, I’ve been building a tasty 18u of euro and most recently a small […]

Pushing the Live Performance Envelope in LA: Mike Slott, Artists on Video; Party Friday

Music has always moved forward when people get together to play. Groups of artists in Los Angeles’ Interface LA collective – and other California groups, like LoveTech and controllerism.com – are challenging each other to keep expanding their technique in playing electronics live. I’m pleased with CDM and some of our friends to support a […]

Graffiti Markup Language: Storing Tags as Data (And Soon, Scratching, Too)

GraffitiMarkupLanguage.com (Trailer) from Evan Roth on Vimeo. Imagine data that stores digital, virtual graffiti tags as easily as you store text. Imagine, then, the power to record and playback tags at different scales, using everything from projection mapping to robotics. Graffiti Markup Language is in ongoing development, but it’s already accomplishing those aims. More: Graffiti […]

Proposal: A Markup Language for Turntable Scratch Performance; Open Call

Scratching, captured. Photo (CC-BY-SA) karl sinfield / sindesign. Add this to the Internet of Things: imagine data recording scratching and scratch performances. Technologists Jamie Wilkinson, Michael Auger, and Kyle McDonald propose a new way of storing scratch moves as data. They’re not just working in traditional ways, either: they’re hacking turntables and optical mice and […]

iPad Gets a Desktop-Style, 48-Track DAW with Plug-ins: What it Means, Answers from a Developer

I like to do six impossible things before breakfast. You? This is either the first death knell for the traditional desktop DAW, or an ill-fated attempt to squeeze a desktop DAW onto a tablet. Or, more likely, it’s somewhere in between. Auria isn’t the first multitrack production studio for a mobile platform, but without question, […]

Pen and Paper as Graphical, Digital Music Score

The latest in a long tradition of transforming hand-drawn graphics into music (see, in particular, Iannis Xenakis and UPIC), we see a computer-vision-powered pen-and-paper music generator. Kovacs Balazs writes: This is a manual sounddrawer. Doesn’t need any sensors, but a camera, paper, colored pens. Doesn’t need sensor glove or reactable as well. What I love […]

One More Teaser: KORG Kaoss in Store?

I think I’m going to have to start teasing random projects I’m doing, like taking a picture of the corner of a dirty dish before I do the dishes, or showing a corner of my shoe before I tie them in the morning. But here’s one more teaser for you, especially since Americans today have […]

DJing, Decks, and a Grid of Samples: NI’s New Take on Traktor

What should DJing software look like, anyway? It’s just a teaser, but for once, the idea is simple, straightforward, and clear. Native Instruments have taken their DJ software, Traktor, and combined it with a grid of pads for sample triggering and loops. The upcoming hardware/software combination we expect later this spring. At the risk of […]

Look at Me, I'm Flying: SpaceNavigator Hardware + Blender

While poking around the site of that brilliant GLSL iPad app, among many wonderful goodies (see link below), I found this excellent demo of SpaceNavigator, the 3D control hardware. Got my SpaceNavigator in the mail today. It’s a 6-dof HID that works great with Blender. I threw together this test scene to get to grips […]