A merry band of complementary filmmakers, photographers, and musicians, a curated ensemble perfectly fitted to the landscape, are heading to remote Iceland to make images and a musical soundtrack inspired by the landscape and its people. Photographers Tim Navis + Kim Høltermand and film collective Scenic are heading up the visual component, while composer and […]

An example score produced with MuseScore’s new lead sheet features. Music notation software has long been seen as a two-horse race, a Pepsi versus Coke stand-off between Finale and Sibelius. But not only are there other alternatives, too, here’s one tool that’s making free and open source notation viable. I’ve spoken previously about engraving tool […]

Imagine access to the power of the modern Web browser – the HTML5 Canvas, hardware-accelerated graphics via WebGL, animation, and more. Now imagine that instead of writing code to access that power, you can connect modules for graphical patching. Windows visualists may recognize the software VVVV. But whereas that tool was restricted to the capabilities […]

Avid released Sibelius 7 yesterday. Highlights in the new version: A new UI. The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may […]

In the ongoing struggle to make a laptop into an instrument, there’s inevitably the scramble onstage (or even in a studio) to get everything primed and ready to play. You want to adjust settings, launch certain applications, and generally get your laptop ready for actual music making. Wouldn’t it be nice to make all of […]

Artist gogo (Sheng Jie ) in Tokyo. Presenting artists from around Earth to viewers around Earth, a center in Beijing has found a way to do live performance for a sleepless world without waking the neighbors. Let me start out by saying this: if you read CDM from China, say hello. We’re in the wrong […]

The appeal of new controllers is melding gesture and sound, metaphor – in tangible form – and musical idea. So before talking about this controller, have a listen to the sounds it produces in the hands of one user, even if another user might do something very different. In a demonstration by Richard Devine, sparse […]

Working in 3D light projection, Dieter Vandoren has created a project that makes visual shapes and sounds from particles. Bodies interrupt beams of light, fused with audio and image via Kinect-powered tracking. First presented in Rotterdam at the Open Dans festival in June, the work draws inspiration from David Rokeby’s “Very Nervous System” computer vision, […]

You’ve heard all the complaints about laptops onstage. But since there are many arguments for a laptop, why not put all that powerful hardware to use, and make your Mac laptop part of a musically-expressive performance? Track Master, a Mac-only application available on the Mac App Store (and one of the few serious music offerings […]

From Austin, Texas, a bit of a haven for brilliant custom sound hardware, comes this epic-looking MIDI controller by Mad Zach, the SR MixControl. Covered in blinding super-bright LEDs, and with an absurdly-thorough complement of sliders, knobs, and arcade buttons, it looks as thought it’d be right at home on your evil flying saucer or […]