Melodies Found in Barcodes, Then Shared, via iPhone

Strings of numbers are everywhere in our world, tucked just outside our awareness alongside identifiers like bar codes. Dutch media artist and inventor Leo van der Veen simply plucks that information and brings it to the fore. Barcodas is a barcode-scanning iPhone app that deciphers common EAN and UPC codes and translates them into musical […]

Inside Handheld Game Art: The Art Style and Making of Swords & Sworcery, Superbrothers Pixel Cinema

Visualist? VJ? Live cinema? Here’s a new one for you: Input Output Cinema. And while IO Cinema has already found a niche in the indie Toronto scene as “an ambiguously pluralized and irritatingly cryptic audiovisual art and design organization,” it now has its first blockbuster game. Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP on the iPad is […]

Inside Handheld Game Art: The Art Style and Making of Swords & Sworcery, Superbrothers Pixel Cinema

Visualist? VJ? Live cinema? Here’s a new one for you: Input Output Cinema. And while IO Cinema has already found a niche in the indie Toronto scene as “an ambiguously pluralized and irritatingly cryptic audiovisual art and design organization,” it now has its first blockbuster game. Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP on the iPad is […]

Game Meets Album: Behind the Music and Design of the iPad Indie Blockbuster Swords & Sworcery

Jim Guthrie was a rockstar long before the iPad was. Paired with pixel-intense artist Craig D. Adams (aka Superbrothers) and the co-design and coding effort of a crack team of video game “wizards” at the indie studio capy, he’s made a soundtrack that’s destined to be a gaming classic. But if you don’t want to […]

NAB 2011 New Gear Preview: HDMI Mixing and Capture, Other Goodies Could Transform Live Visuals

Dawn of the HDMI VJ age? Photo (CC-BY-ND) Sam_catch. Ed.: Create Digital Motion contributor Anton Marini reports from NAB, the broadcast gear show this week. While “broadcast” had traditionally been the emphasis, this is 2011 – and a lot of what’s on offer could transform live visuals and design. From tablets manipulating Photoshop to new […]

A Record Player Made from Paper, as the FlexiDisc Lives; Thanks Be to Pythagoras

It’s not in any way digital – we’re in paper and needle territory – but clever design transforms packaging and notecard into playable music device. Create Transducer Music, anyone? Designer Kelli Anderson concocted a novel approach to the wedding invitation for her friends Karen and Mike: turn the paper invite into a playable sound device. […]

Adventures in Time and Space: Timelapse and Macro Photo-Motion

Photography can transform scale, whether in time, space, or a combination of the two. scntfc, the hyper-talented audiovisual artist, sends some eye-explodingly good work our way, prompted by yesterday’s coverage of a two-minute condensation of a trip from San Francisco to Paris. Before returning to the theme of timelapse time travel and aerospace, let’s look […]

Learn Mastering Technique in Free Videos: Limiting, M/S, Dubstep Bass

Mastering to me is a bit like applying stain to wood: done correctly, it brings out the definition of what’s there rather than covering it up. But making mastering effective is a really special art. Danny Wyatt, a veteran mastering engineer now working as an instructor with Dubspot, has some serious credentials both on the […]

Timelapse Collapses Space: San Francisco to Paris in Two Minutes

If you haven’t seen it make its rounds yet, the collaboration of textile artist Kate Nartker and musical-visual artist Nate Bolt has put together a stunning example of timelapse done right. Timelapse is often conceived as a way to collapse the temporal, but time and space are, indeed, relative – most of all when strapped […]

An All-Android Hip-hop Album, and the Tools Used to Create It

Now airport lounge layover-ready and musical – the Android platform. A hip-hop release that used these handheld tools exclusively is a good window into what’s out there. Photo (CC-BY) Laihiuyeung Ryanne. From an eBay-purchased Atari ST to your phone, you really can make electronic music however you like, wherever you like. Generally, I’ve therefore been […]