Got an hour? A bit behind on your music video watching for 2011, or want to revisit some moments? Renier Mouthaan mixes together music videos of the past year, along with some news, in case you forgot which year this was. (I forgive you.) I’m always impressed by the completionist impulse in this sort of […]

2011 has seen sweeping changes in technology and music, alongside the loss of titans Max Mathews and Tsutomu Katoh, two pioneers of our world. Some of these stories passed quietly; some with great fanfare. Here, we reveal those stories that attracted the greatest number of Internet eyeballs, a metric not necessarily of importance but certainly […]

Keys open doors to creative music making in a community-led process. Photo (CC-BY) Cassie / Angelandspot. What an extraordinary thing an interface can be, a map to making music. A new community-generated album from users of the now-legendary monome grid instrument yields a variety of musical outcomes. The results are instrumental and lovely, breaking off […]

In a stunning, surreal set of tests, our friends at Bologna, Italy-based Apparati Effimeri are using stereoscopy and projection mapping to muck with the fabric of what you perceive in a garden or architecture. The results would make Dali go buy a six pack of beamers. There’s little to say other than to have a […]

In action, a Eurorack module by superb builder MakeNoise, with whom we caught up in March in a get-together in Austin, Texas. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Andreas Wetterberg. Modular music making is a throwback to the early days of electronic music, in which a spaghetti of patch cords is the price of open-ended sound creation. Fairly or […]

For fans of slicing, dicing, glitching, reversing, and shuffling incoming audio streams, this Max for Live Device is for you. Shuffler 2.0 is the latest in a series of “modular” Max for Live devices from developer Isotonik Studios. Mappable to MIDI, the suite of Devices focuses on simpler tasks in ways that can be combined. […]

I’m not sure how everyone who owns an iPad uses it for music, but I find myself strangely drawn, more than anything else, to analog step sequencers. With MIDI connections – via a special interface or a standard USB MIDI interface connected via adapter to the tablet – you can even drive hardware. For me, […]

Then: flat, rectangular displays. Now: projection mapping flat images to 3D objects. Next: volumetric displays. From New York’s Chelsea neighborhood come two very inventive visual projects, opening in January. Matt Parker, veteran of New York University’s ITP brain-building program (don’t ask what it stands for), leads research at NYC’s Eyebeam in some seriously-cool volumetric display […]

Then: flat, rectangular displays. Now: projection mapping flat images to 3D objects. Next: volumetric displays. From New York’s Chelsea neighborhood come two very inventive visual projects, opening in January. Matt Parker, veteran of New York University’s ITP brain-building program (don’t ask what it stands for), leads research at NYC’s Eyebeam in some seriously-cool volumetric display […]

Come on – you know that occasionally you want technology to respond when you slap it. As my sister watched an episode of the television show Quantum Leap, I thoroughly enjoyed watch Dean Stockwell’s character Al give his pocket computer, looking for all the world like a 7″ tablet, little helpful smacks. SmackTop does that […]