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 […]

The Glitch Mob is one of the hot summer tickets for electronic music, and they’re fortunate enough to stage a massive live visual spectacle alongside the show. This week’s a perfect time to consider all that visual goodness, with the release of their latest original music, “We Can Make the World Stop” on EP. So […]

Cycling ’74 this week has announced an upcoming new version of its Max software, the DIY patching software for multimedia, from live sound and music to visuals. It looks as though more details will be available in the fall, but we at least get a glimpse of the goals for Max 6, as well as […]

As an addendum to our first look at Propellerhead’s new Reason 6 announcements (including incorporating Record), Propellerhead points us to a promo video of their new Balance audio interface. We’ve seen efforts before to make software more appealing to newcomers by bundling an audio interface, so this is, on the face of it, hardly “stop-the-presses!” […]

Let’s be completely clear: pop over to the Mac App Store right now, and in addition to grabbing Final Cut Pro X for $300, you can pick up, a la carte, either Motion or Compressor. Whereas for a time Apple required the purchase of Final Cut Studio to get the companion apps, you can now […]