An Ableton rig with a dramatically-lit Novation Launchpad grid controller. Photo (CC-BY-SA) alexwire. Ableton Live fans hungry for sounds, what a good half-year it’s been. AfroDJMac alone has been busy putting together delicious-sounding, versatile racks of virtual Ableton-ready gear. After six months of contributing free downloads and videos – and discovering the use of this […]

DJ Apathy, anyone? DJs and audiences alike may have lost the plot of the DJ Mag Top 100 list – but technology could help the list get its groove back, says a former writer. Photo (CC-BY vmiramontes. DJ Magazine’s Top 100 list of DJs is irrelevant and broken, based on a flawed methodology, prone to […]

Even as studios abandon cell animation and all the attention in effects tends to go do digital rendering, there’s something to be said for real-for-real — photographing real-world things, making real things in miniature, and setting the real world into motion. While it runs afield of our usual subject matter, this video definitely qualifies as […]

For those interested in coding their own audiovisual creations inside the artist-friendly language Processing, here’s an e-book that will help unlock the world of sound. Hot on the heels of my own workshop recently at Los Angeles’ Crash Space hackshop using our new Pd for Processing library, Evan X. Merz has an extensive ebook that […]

I’ll be flying from Toronto to Amsterdam, so as the song goes, “remember me to Herald Sq– God, sorry. It isn’t the prettiest part of Manhattan, exactly. Go in there and talk about music and then go to one of New York’s nicer parts. High Line! Photo by/(C) Oliver Chesler from last year; see the […]

Good fuel for coding and hacking? Bagels, natch. Photo by Dac Chartrand for CDM. Music Hack Day is an event that’s been gaining lots of steam. Packing engineering experimentation into a marathon session of collaborative, improvised work, followed by lots of sharing, the event tends to focus largely on Web services but also includes novel […]

Virtuoso coder and prolific digital artist Kyle McDonald is at it again, here in collaboration with similarly expressive and skilled coder Arturo Castro. Together, working in openFrameworks, they make use of a face tracking library to turn the image of a face into new, terrifying visions once imagined only in science fiction. Here, going beyond […]

In Toronto this Friday, we’ll be connecting with InterAccess Gallery in a celebration of DIY, adventurous music making, and blipping synthesizers. It’ll also be the first public debut of the new MeeBlip micro, a pocket-sized version of our MeeBlip open source hardware synth. Part of why I’m excited to be hacking away with the fine […]

It’s finished … but Dubspot will have follow-up video of the event soon. Streaming live from Dubspot in New York, Martin Kaltenbrunner and I are talking about interface design and music, in the context of his Reactable tangible interface. Join us, ask some questions, and stay tuned for more video after the session is done. […]

Cyril Stoller shares this project, for a variety of multitouch devices (Mac / Windows / Linux / Android, screens and projection) through the also-free-and-open-source Kivy framework. It’s inspired by the brilliant Haken Continuum fingerboard, but whereas that more tactile controller is hard to get, this runs cheaply all over the place. (It could also be […]