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. […]

You know you’re in for something different with an article that contains this line: “as 256 bytes is becoming the new 4K, there has been ever more need to play decent music in the 256-byte size class. ” In just a single line of code, Finnish artist and coder countercomplex, working with other contributors, is […]

Writing code for music may still seem a remote notion to the vast majority of even geekier digital musicians, but as exemplified by the language Overtone, it looks very different than coding once did. Whereas sound code was once a type-and-render affair, new coding environments focus on live coding. They use elegant, lightweight modern languages […]

Okay, I think this may be some of the best / worst promotional marketing I’ve seen for music software. It runs something like this: Do you want to be just like Jamie Lidell? The answer is as close as the iTunes App Store and your portable device. Just download Native Instruments’ iMaschine app to your […]

Montreal-based Damian Taylor, music director and engineer for Björk, is the subject of an epic interview on cycling74.com, spanning music, life in Montreal, working with Björk and what makes her special, and what patching in Max/MSP can mean compositionally and creatively. Damian has some especially nice reflections on what having an open-ended music environment can […]

Touch on devices like the iPad is functional, but limited in its expression – there’s no pressure or tactile feedback. That’s why we’ve enthusiastically followed Randy Jones’ “continuous capacitive sensing” technology on the Soundplane for some time. Sensing pressure, it behaves more like an acoustic instrument might – that is, if such an acoustic instrument […]