Kids today, with their new-fangled desire to listen to music cut into grooves on big circular platters… Photo (CC-BY) Matthias Rhomberg. At first, it seemed like it might be just a blip: amidst generally declining sales of physical music, down sharply from their 1990s boom, vinyl sales were trending up. The reversal started with a […]

Now you’re thinking in spheres. We’ve been covering Syphon since its introduction – see a recent interview with co-creator Anton Marini. The idea is to give visual apps on the Mac the ability to pipe textures from one app to another, as simply as you’d connect sound signal on a computer or in a studio. […]

Computing technology is an inherently disruptive thing, wonderfully so. It solves problems you didn’t know you had. It creates problems, then creates new problems in even trying to understand those problems. Simply using a computer is a kind of design statement. You’ve seen questions about what happens with computer performance and audience interaction. But, in […]

Okay, I’m not sure the computers can break a sweat (at least not without some serious consequences). But all the people projection-mapping generatively sequencing live audiovisualism electronic thingamabops sure are working hard in the above teaser video for Amon Tobin’s live ‘ISAM’ show. Not a lot of cities get to see the results, but those […]

What’s a “lab,” anyway? For music, any number of tools – software or hardware – can become gateways to creative musical explorations. Chris Stack joins us again to look at Nodal, Mac/Windows software that generates musical patterns from graphical maps of nodes, alongside hardware explorations. Along the way, Chris has some reflections on composition itself. […]

Joshue Ott, media artist and designer and the visual developer of Thicket for iOS, joins us for a special guest post. First, he shows off the ability of the iPad 2 for full-blown, better-than 1080p HD output, at native 1920×1200. For developers, he also demonstrates how to get the same results. Why does this matter? […]

Fermid, by Behnaz Babazadeh, is a beautiful kinetic sculpture that acts like a breathing organism – or perhaps a colony of parametric creatures. As the artist describes it: Fermid is a kinetic sculpture that uses technology and parametric design principles to explore the natural movement that can be found in living organisms. Special Thanks to […]

Pour some port, find a comfy spot on the couch, and fire up the YouTubes. A surprisingly-rich raft of terrific documentary video for synth and electronic music enthusiasts has been making the rounds. In our queue: Analog Suicide interviews a legendary vintage synth spot in Berlin, an hourlong documentary features not only Richie Hawtin but […]

Resolume, the VJ app – now really a live visual and audiovisual tool – has turned ten. The developers this week look back at that landmark, and reveal the first-ever license owner, the Dutch VJ team Vision Impossible. The original Resolume interface – now available as a free download. They’re making the original Resolume 1.0 […]

Two spacey ways of finding media: music collections, heirarchy, and images of planets in Planetary for iPad, top. Sound and loop collections, “magnetic” relations, algorithmic categorization, and rapid torchlight auditioning in Soundtorch 2.0 for Windows, bottom. If your music and sound collections seem like outwardly-expanding universes, two new tools promise to bring order by representing […]