Photo (CC-BY) Mark Anderson. The generation of people who defined modern computing seems to be passing this year. Following Max Mathews, another Bell Labs titan is lost to us: Dennis Ritchie is the man who created the original C programming language (again at Bell Labs) as well as co-developed the UNIX operating system. President Obama […]

Light-up grids of buttons are nearly commonplace, but the BlipBox is something different: its array of lights is also a sensor, making it both X/Y controller and light-up grid. And it’s designed to be completely open — firmware, hardware, schematics and documentation are all fully GPL-licensed and open source. For those of us who aren’t […]

It had to happen — button triggering, as popularized by the monome, here meets a conventional two-channel DJ mixer. But the layout I must say is quite spare and lovely, the work of the Japanese-based PICnome project. Furthermore, it’s Open Source Hardware, covered as I have recommended by a ShareAlike Creative Commons license (with no […]

In celebration of our extensive look at the music (and working habits) of Dkon, formerly Deceptikon, here’s the video for “Broken Synthesizers.” Any further comment would be superfluous. Check out the music side of things over at CDMusic: What You Don’t Need to Make Music: With A Poly 800 and Renoise, Dkon Talks Music Making, […]

In celebration of our extensive look at the music (and working habits) of Dkon, formerly Deceptikon, here’s the video for “Broken Synthesizers.” Any further comment would be superfluous. Check out the music side of things over at CDMusic: What You Don’t Need to Make Music: With A Poly 800 and Renoise, Dkon Talks Music Making, […]

Deceptikon morphs into Dkon — and talks to us about doing more with less. Photo courtesy the artist. Artist Zack Wright, for a handful of followers of what we used to call IDM, will be a blast from the past. Recording as Deceptikon on labels like Merck and Daly City Records, Zack is back. His […]

This update I believe is worth a second post, as it makes visible the otherwise-mysterious algorithms producing music in our previous post. And yes, I believe this is “music,” naysayers aside. Whether it’s good music is in the ears of the listener, but if you can describe this much sound with this little code, imagine […]

Look out, flat 4:3 and 16:9 rectangles. Projection mapping – the simple but potentially-expressive technique of using projected light on more complex three-dimensional surfaces – appears to be here to stay. And it’s even reached Mongolia. Reader Joe Catchpole writes to let us know about his project, combining Ableton Live with VJ app Modul8, Mac […]

On Create Digital Music today, we cover stunningly-complex, if aesthetically very digital, compositions compacted into single lines of C code: Entire Musical Compositions Made from Just One Line of Code are Glitchy but Musical It’s in the grand tradition of communities like the demoscene, but features algorithmic invention that has lots of people excited. Friend-of-the-site […]

Does CDM get a lot of email? Yes, yes, it does. Some of them are valuable and fascinating and – all apologies to all of you – manage to slip through the inbox. Some, however, are simply exceptionally strange. This is just from this morning: Topic: musis Message: i need pad Okay. Guess you do. […]