Composing with rules instead of playing notes directly, composer Richard Garrett has built a series of generative, algorithmic, ambient note makers and processors in Ableton Live and the Max for Live add-on. (And yes, user-generated content continues to be a rationale for why many people would purchase Max for Live in addition to Live itself.) […]

At bottom, a strobe and high-speed camera accurately represent the way in which a string is moving. At top, a video taken with an iPhone camera distorts your sense of how the string is moving by capturing instead images of standing waves, caused by the rolling shutter on the device. The video isn’t wrong – […]

sktch is a different kind of art tool for the mobile app age. For starters, it’s the outgrowth of a media outlet: Creative Applications Network, led by London-based architect, technologist, and curator Filip Visnjic, has already become the go-to site for people interested in making apps into art. The application itself embodies some of that […]

Ed. Twisted Tools are a special breed of music software makers, concocting wild-sounding instruments, sequencers, and effects, all with a distinctively-colorful and graphical approach to interface design. And they do all of this in Reaktor, Native Instruments’ deep toolbox for visual development of soundmakers, a patching cousin to tools like Max/MSP, Pd, and Plogue Bidule. […]

In a serious breakthrough for the open source visual community, intrepid Google Summer of Code-sponsored developers have managed to work advanced camera tracking into the free and open source 3D / video / everything else tool Blender. Part of what makes that impressive is that Blender, far from just being a shadow of proprietary alternatives, […]

In some cross between a self-aware, intelligent computer a la HAL and an experimental sound artist, the project Digimancy presents a talking, synth-playing Commodore 64. Get through a few minutes of it spouting theory, and somewhere at about 6 minutes, 30 seconds in this video, that Commodore 64 starts to jam with danceable, glitchy sounds. […]

It’s easy to forget that some of the simple joys of electronic music are foreign to many lay people. Odds are, if you read this site, you’re an intelligent and well-informed digital musician. (I don’t mean to stroke my own ego, either; because so many of you are intelligent and well-informed digital musicians, you send […]

Following yesterday’s interview with Kyle McDonald on FaceOSC, his custom webcam + tracking application that can make music with your face, here’s another face-controlled music demo. This one uses Ableton Live for jamming. I should add, since I somewhat obscured the fact, that this isn’t Kinect: it works entirely with a built-in webcam, which means […]

Novacut, via a Kickstarter campaign gone viral, promises real-time collaborative video editing from an open source tool. Open source video editing itself has been a long-unfulfilled dream; software from Blender to kdenlive can do editing in theory, but it’s hardly a seamless experience for an editor experienced in the proprietary competition. At the same time, […]

Music making with your face? It’s just the latest novel way of manipulating your computer with movement, thanks to a revived interest in camera-based interaction spurred by Microsoft’s Kinect and hackers making it work, and other computer vision libraries. One original work: FaceOSC, which uses custom tracking code and a standard computer webcam (no additional […]