Granular synthesis, as described by Iannis Xenakis, imagined sound as constructed from elementary elements. In the work of Zimoun, elementary sonic grains are physical. An undulating wall of cardboard rubs surfaces against one another to form a chorus of sound. Cotton balls roll against boxes in throaty clouds of sound. Wires wriggle like some sort […]

In a sea of software and hardware, a handful of releases every year stand out. On the software side, one of the most promising is Rob Papen’s Punch. It reflects a number of trends in soft synth design – given a choice between sampling and synthesis, it choose both; 64-bit support comes standard; pattern sequencing […]

Got this hardware? Then watch YouTube go into 3D. All you need is to get a friend to toss some fish from behind your monitor to complete the effect. (See: Muppets Take Manhattan.) The promise of genuinely open video isn’t just making something “open” for the sake of it. Realizing that potential means doing something […]

With projected mapped to more than just the cinema-style plane, and now smarter integrated sensing and vision applications like Microsoft’s Kinect, all sorts of surfaces can come alive. It transforms projection from something cinematic to an interactive, dynamic part of the space. So, while this project isn’t new (both videos were released last year), it’s […]

Auto-Tuning a guitar is coming, say Antares. But if that seems frightening, it may be worth a closer look. Photo of the (classic) guitar (CC-BY) John W. Tuggle. A new tool could be for the expressive, not just the lazy. That’s the read of Auto-Tune for guitar, and it makes me excited to see what […]

Yamaha’s CP-35 may fall short of being a classic, but it is capable of some pleasant, dreamy sounds. That is, if you can actually lift it. Impossibly heavy and cumbersome, here’s a job for sampling if ever there was one. A free Ableton Live rack gives you convenient access to the instruments and live effects. […]

There’s something about symmetrical rhythms, it seems: through the power of math, these rhythms sound really good. We’ve looked a couple of times before at the spread of the Euclidean Algorithm for producing rhythms; see below. Wouter Hisschemöller has updated what began as an in-browser Flash tool to build an free and open source, Java-based […]

In Lit Tree, the design team Kimchi and Chips create dances of light across a potted tree, augmenting the plant life by transforming its leaves into voxels. 3D volumetric projection create clouds of light. In time, it could even impact growth – a kind of bonsai technique with light. Given the work’s relevance both artistically […]

All images courtesy The Bob Moog Foundation. Used by permission. Go visit them, and enjoy many more. Moog made the scene, indeed. In this birthday week for Bob Moog, here’s a gallery looking back at the man and in advertisements, the Minimoog, the keyboard that shaped so much of synthesis to this day. I could […]

Miro 4, an open source video player, has long been promising at least on paper as a means of sharing and watching open video. But the delivery in early versions was shaky, suffering from stability issues in some cases and simply failing to provide a compelling use case in others – particularly with browsers and […]