Chris Randall’s Apple IIc display shows off the elementary beauty of alphaSyntauri. Photo (CC-BY-NC) Chris Randall, via Flickr. Global availability of music may not have silenced the usual gripes about musical quality and diversity, even if they should. But the Web is providing a place for people to share music with other music-making enthusiasts, sharing […]

Didier Dambrin, FL Studio’s original creator, has a new synth entitled Harmor that looks like one to watch. There’s a beautiful crop of new synthesizers this season that could have you yearning for a winter spent with long nights somewhere deep in the Northern Hemisphere, producing new music – see also, to name just one, […]

I generally avoid commenting on Apple rumors, lest I find a severed horse head atop my MacBook Pro, but this one seems simply to be obvious. Apple took a radical approach to Final Cut Pro X (and Motion), giving them full overhauls and new UIs, 64-bit support, and distribution through the online Mac App Store […]

Amon Tobin and company are soliciting fan videos for inclusion in a Ninja Tune DVD box set and for streaming online. Quick description: We are collecting fan made videos of Amon’s work for an upcoming DVD release. Please submit your videos here and review the “Terms” within the forum: vimeo.com/​groups/​106265/​forumthread:244568 Deadline for the project is […]

Can’t get enough of the upcoming drum machine, Tempest, by Roger Linn and Dave Smith? Reader Josh Decker sends in this video by Josh’s friend Rob Baker, aka Redivider, tearing up the machine as a performance instrument. Also, follow the comment thread on our previous post for some follow-up from Dave Smith Instruments to reader […]

I love this controller, but I think we should keep it Platonic. Solid. Sorry, geometry humor. See, the controller in question is constructed as a convex regular polyhedron, such that all its faces are themselves congruent regular polygons meeting at each vertex, and … uh, never mind. Above, a stunningly gorgeous video from Polish media […]

You might imagine sound in space, or dream up gestures that traverse unexplored sonic territory. But actually building it is another matter. Kinect – following a long line of computer vision applications and spatial sensors – lets movement and gestures produce sound. The challenge of such instruments has long been that learning to play them […]

This week holds for me lots to talk about on CDM, lots to teach, lots to make – and for many of our readers, it’s an action-packed week coming back from summer vacation and/or a long weekend. So, let’s start it off right with some good music. Jakub Alexander is a Brooklyn-based DJ whose work […]

Beyond the immediate, and fleeting, novelty of seeing images fitted perfectly to three-dimensional objects, you need something to actually watch. Here, new work from Melbourne-based artist Chris Staring is splendidly fanciful: a band of assembled musical instruments is immersed in animation, a bit like walking into Toontown in Roger Rabbit. In fact, speaking of Disney, […]

Native Instruments reveals some big news for Maschine that’s … well, smaller. A new package has smaller hardware and lower price, with the same full-sized software. And an iOS version lets you use Maschine on iPad or iPhone. As their drum machine / drum sampler / groove workstation with plug-in hosting and doubling as plug-in […]