The original Walkman had two headphone jacks. (@OReillyMedia reminds us – and if you look closely, you can spot them!) Couples sharing iPod earbuds was an early sign of communal listening. So, how did the portable player turn listening inward – and how can you turn it back in the connected, Web age? Industry titans […]

All photos by Marsha Vdovin for CDM. Click for full-sized, gear pr0n versions. Print large-format, hang above your bed. CDM guest and photographer Marsha Vdovin joins us for a photo essay. Given free reign to choose what she wanted to do, she visits a Buchla module maker. Photos can speak volumes, and here the beauty […]

Electronic aesthetics have been deeply rooted in live visuals, but that’s even greater reason to explore materiality. Dev Harlan, a New York-based artist working in sculpture, light, and projection, has built a collaboration with the now-legendary Polish-born, New York-crocheting Olek (aka Agata Oleksiak). Olek’s work has included what might best be described as crochet interventions. […]

FL Studio Mobile, previously announced for iOS, is now available for iPhone, iPod touch, and, in an “HD” edition, on iPad 1 and 2. The biggest feature: if you’re an FL Studio user, you can take your projects and load them on the mobile version for on-the-go editing. That makes FL the first major, non-Apple […]

All this power, all this technology, and … yup, we’re making another aquarium. Works for me. As part of WebGL’s ongoing growing pains, Web engineers have gotten into a war of words that finds even some Microsoft engineers squaring off against other Microsoft engineers. Look closely, though, and you’ll see some real progress on making […]

All this power, all this technology, and … yup, we’re making another aquarium. Works for me. As part of WebGL’s ongoing growing pains, Web engineers have gotten into a war of words that finds even some Microsoft engineers squaring off against other Microsoft engineers. Look closely, though, and you’ll see some real progress on making […]

You may have seen it already as it makes its viral rounds, but an advertising video for Japanese mobile giant NTT Docomo is a poetic model of how musical events are encoded, whether through means tangible or digital. A track of pitches makes a wooden ball into a mallet, traversing a track as it is […]

On the road from futuristic instrumental concept to real-world product, the Yamaha Tenori-On as shipped lacked some of the functionality its creator, gifted media artist Toshio Iwai, originally imagined. Notably, wireless networking, which promised social music-making with other devices, was gone, replaced with a more-limited MIDI connector. Now, in a surprisingly literal translation from the […]

Alternative key layouts have popped up in commercial hardware and now iPad apps and such, but there’s nothing like trying to build something to grasp how it works. An intrepid group of makers who call themselves Louisville Soundbuilders are working now to clone the C-Thru Music AXiS-64. The goal: their own, original instrument that uses […]

Pictured: Loopseque, in final form (top) and sketched on paper (bottom). Images courtesy the developers; visit them on Flickr. Saturday afternoon in Toronto, I’m giving a talk to the North by Northeast festival on music software and tablets. I’ll explain a bit about what tablets are about, and some of the software that’s out there […]