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 […]

From the wonderful world of plug-ins, we’ve got some good news for soft synth lovers. I covered the forthcoming Z3TA+ 2 release from Cakewalk last week, and a number of readers pointed to the brilliant work of Urs Heckmann. As it happens, Urs has a number of updates releasing this week, adding 64-bit support, compatibility […]

Today, we note the availability on Android of Control, a WebKit-based touch interface also on iOS. For visualists and interactive designers, it’s worth paying attention to one feature in particular: dynamic interface creation. Perhaps biased by the musicians who have tended to embrace them, touch interfaces have tended to rely on the static layouts favored […]

If you’re looking to turn an Android phone or flashy, new Android tablet into a touch controller for music, you’ll be really glad to see OSC and MIDI controller Control. Furthermore, here’s a solid, powerful app based on the Web that lets Apple and Android fans play well together. I’ve sung the praises of Control’s […]

For connecting music hardware from the 80s, 90s, 2000s, and today, you can’t beat MIDI and the standard MIDI connector (5-pin DIN). This week, both IK Multimedia and Line 6 announced adapters that support Core MIDI. Previously possible on iPad via the Camera Connection Kit, the new adapters support the 30-pin dock connector for the […]