Machine rhythm: the steps on a Roland TR-808. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Brandon Daniel. What makes rhythm human? Music technology has introduced machine rhythms, perfectly-calibrated to electronically-perfected grids, yet we know that natural playing is more organic. Or, that is, we know we have certain intuitive preferences. How do those preferences and rhythms really work? And what […]

Presenting a moving (and moving) snapshot of what the emerging field of live visualism is all about, the new trailer for the Mapping Festival might just give you a shiver. Thanks to Jerome Monnot, the trailer’s director, for sending this our way – and for the fine work. mappingfestival.ch Remember, you’re fast approaching the deadline […]

Presenting a moving (and moving) snapshot of what the emerging field of live visualism is all about, the new trailer for the Mapping Festival might just give you a shiver. Thanks to Jerome Monnot, the trailer’s director, for sending this our way – and for the fine work. mappingfestival.ch Remember, you’re fast approaching the deadline […]

There are simpler, more minimal interfaces, and more tangible interfaces for Ableton Live. But when it comes to all-stops-pulled, touch-everything control of the full depth of Ableton Live, it was already hard to beat TouchAble for iPad. Now, with an update, that app closes even more of the gap between what you can do on […]

Let’s get straight to it: Ozone has already established itself as a do-everything mastering tool. It’s a suite of interconnected modules handling frequency and dynamics, designed to work together in an integrated interface. It does so much, in fact, that it’s hard for an upgrade to do more, but Ozone 5 promises new sound and […]

FL Studio, beloved to its users by its original name “Fruity Loops,” has long had a Playlist mode that could be used to assemble simple live performances by jumping to sections of your music. But a new alpha mode takes this mode far further. It’s still based on the Playlist, but can add clips dynamically […]

In the latest take on sonifying data in musical form, iPhone app Astro Cantus plots star data from the universe as musical notes. It turns the the sphere of heavens above the Earth into a massive piano roll. Co-founding developer Rocky Alvey, according to the creators, dismantled a music box as a kid, and that […]

You’ve come a long way, baby. In fact, in the midst of this whole debate, consider what phones can do – and what they’ll be able to do soon. As an artist, that’s incredibly compelling. Photo (CC-BY) Fred Benenson. While ZDNet stands behind the story, this should be classified as “rumor” until an official statement […]

Perhaps you’ve seen the demo videos, as people do astounding things by moving their body around and using the Kinect camera to make music. Now, a set of Max for Live devices makes it reasonably easy to access your body as input inside Ableton Live.

Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes […]