You can complain about music events and festivals as they are, dream about what you’d imagine an event could be – or you can go and make it happen. And since the latter category fits friends-of-the-site Chris Gilroy and Lara Grant, it’s well worth an endorsement for this weekend’s In/Out Festival. (For their part, both […]

Calibration workshop, demonstrating the gathered energy and brainpower in Pittsburgh last month. Photo by our friend, the extraordinary Kyle McDonald, whose teaching is behind a lot of the creative output here. Microsoft may be running showy ads that show imagined applications of 3D computer vision, but using technology like Microsoft’s own Kinect, hackers are making […]

Calibration workshop, demonstrating the gathered energy and brainpower in Pittsburgh last month. Photo by our friend, the extraordinary Kyle McDonald, whose teaching is behind a lot of the creative output here. Microsoft may be running showy ads that show imagined applications of 3D computer vision, but using technology like Microsoft’s own Kinect, hackers are making […]

There’s a beautiful immediacy and tactile quality to hardware step sequencers. And there’s all the flexibility, convenience, and power of software. Solution: combine them. We’ve been following various custom creations for the music production tool Renoise – the latest being a lovely performance grid, and back in 2009, the beginnings of Launchpad grid sequencing. You […]

In a twist on generating music from dance, artist and coder João Pais sends us Pd-generated scores, transformed into twinkling sounds by music boxes. As it happens, the music boxes are the same featured in Friday’s story on Ritornell. The piece is RISS, a “performative installation/concert” produced outdoors in Berlin, with a 30-meter score generated […]

Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object. Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity […]

Alongside its Pro Tools 10 and HDX unveiling, Avid turned some heads by recently announcing it was replacing its RTAS and TDM formats to a new format called AAX, “Avid Audio eXtension.” Now, your first reaction may not be unbridled enthusiasm, exactly: it seems the last thing users are likely saying is, “yes, please, I’d […]

Make all the hipster jokes you like. Fashionable film photography could be all that lies between us and the demise of film. With camera manufacturing and film stock going out of production, enthusiasts – both the inventors/merchandisers and users – are having to rebuild the film revolution from scratch. And while this site’s name has […]

Every so often, something comes along that’s just irresistibly lovable. So it was with the Korg monotron. With a price of US$60 (or far less), a pocketable size, the ability to run on batteries, a nice, glowing red LFO knob, a delicious filter, and toy-like playability, everyone loves the monotron. People who have racks of […]

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the […]