Alder Soundplane prototype with blanks of reclaimed redwood and Doug Fir. Photo by Randy Jones; used by permission. On tablets, on displays, multi-touch control these days is calibrated largely as a software interface – more Starship Enterprise panel than violin. As such, it works well for production tools and exploring compositional ideas. But it falls […]

Patching together unique sounds on the classic Buchla 100 was an impetus for a new software instrument by Randy Jones – just released for Windows. Photo (CC-BY) guiltyx/roll_initiative. Software can easily enough emulate, down to each knob and patch cord, a vintage synthesizer. But can a genuinely new software synth incorporate the ideas about instrument […]

CDM regular Zaxx Davros sends word of a new, sprawling compilation to benefit Joplin, Missouri in the aftermath of that town’s devastating tornado. Charity compilations seem to be growing in number, but perhaps that in itself is worth mentioning. As social networks and (ahem) blogs spread, increasingly crowd-stimulated micro-donations drive charity. One-click giving is no […]

Seen at Mutek, Comaduster’s piece “Scrape” is a sumptuous, sensual photographic feast of macro imagery. Amidst audiovisual work that has tended to narrow aesthetic bands like minimalism or slick 3D futurism, I find work like this stimulating as a suggestion of the kind of explorations to come. With digital media wide-open by design, there’s really […]

Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re looking for a tool for composing and editing scores on your iPad, Avid Scorch isn’t it — not yet, at least. But as a score reader, Scorch could be a glimpse of a future in which tablets create a new marketplace and exchange for notated […]

Electronic musician, vocalist, and inventor Tim Exile is back; while the Google Doodle today of an interactive Les Paul inspired lots of people to invest some time fiddling and hacking, in Tim’s case, it inspired a whole song. And, to my knowledge, it’s the first time the homepage of Google got its own ode. Bet […]

Electric guitar pioneer Les Paul is one of the all-time greats in music instrument invention, so the guy clearly deserves an animated Google Doodle of his creation that you can play. Strum chords, pluck with the mouse, and even record phrases on Google’s homepage. (See video, above.) Since Google Doodles are archived – and since […]

Kore is dead; long live … Maschine. Native Instruments announced this week that they’re discontinuing the Kore product line, focusing those energies on the host-plus-sampling groovebox Maschine. Kore was an approach to making instruments and processing more manageable and tactile, coupling a hardware interface and standard control mappings with a hosting tool. What first drew […]

Yesterday, we saw a bit of the idea of making mobile gadgets more sociable with each other. The idea is, through network/wireless and cabled connectivity, you extend possibilities for expression, control, and collaboration with yourself and others. It’s the same thing that makes a recording studio useful: tools work together to let people work together […]

Adding hardware to tablets, as it has with decades of computing technology, can open up new worlds for software and music. It can animate a conventional piano, or provide new physical interfaces for touching music. But let’s not wait for it to happen; let’s get hacking. Following on today’s line of thinking about hardware-augmented touch, […]