Derrick May in the Michigan Theatre parking garage, 1988. Photos by Bart Everly. Reproduced courtesy Wax Poetics. In the words of Yogi Berra, the future ain’t what it used to be. Drawing from futurist philosophy and the machine aesthetic of bands like Kraftwerk, the moment at which techno comes into the world is a seminal […]

Courtesy of Apple. A mind-boggling number of words have been spilled around Apple’s Final Cut Pro X release. I won’t add to that editorializing here, but I will point to some information that I think can help you make sense of the new software, some of its promise, and some of the issues that are […]

In a great example of video’s power to tell a story and send a message – particularly when embellished visually – design student Ron “RonConCocaCola” (School of Visual Arts) presents documentation of just how chaotic a single New York City intersection can be. There are some especially bad moves by cyclists, though motorists try their […]

In a great example of video’s power to tell a story and send a message – particularly when embellished visually – design student Ron “RonConCocaCola” (School of Visual Arts) presents documentation of just how chaotic a single New York City intersection can be. There are some especially bad moves by cyclists, though motorists try their […]

AudioGL, a project teased in videos first in April and then again last week, is a new concept in designing a user interface for real-time music creation. Visuals and sound alike are generative, with the rotating, 3D-wireframe graphics and symbolic icons representing a kind of score for live synthesized music. The tracks in the video […]

Some of us move freely between the real and virtual dimensions, can make dubstep basses just by moving our spine, and shoot flames out of our hands naturally. For everyone else, there’s this. Ryan Challinor, whose day gig is as a developer working on Dance Central, apparently just couldn’t get enough Kinect hacking at his […]

Can editing sounds be as easy as editing pixels in a tool like Photoshop? That’s the question asked yet again by an audio editor, in the announcement of a new tool called Spectral Layers, seen in a new teaser. Visualizing sound is not a simple problem, but you can do worse than the spectral view. […]

In images by Benjamin Gaulon, Evan Meaney, NOSYNC, Galen Richmond, and Phillip Stearns, circuit bending – most associated with sound – becomes visual medium. “Glitch,” to me, is an incomplete word for this work, and one that can in some cases give the uninitiated the wrong idea. These are electronic visual textures, as raw and […]

The Swarmatron, made infamous by The Social Network, is just one of the crazy sonic creations we’ll be seeing this weekend. Photo credit: Joshua Sarner. This weekend in North Adams, Massachusetts at MASS MoCA, the band Wilco is gathering their very own music and arts festival, Solid Sound. It’s become a real oasis of unique […]

Circuit bending has a reputation as involving far-out, unstructured experimental noise, of real violence and distortion done to instruments. And there’s probably a place for that. But Reed Ghazala, circuit bending’s spiritual father and electronic practitioner, takes a more organic, evolutionary approach. Reed recently told me about his favorite application of his iPad, apart from […]