The armies of the earbuds are everywhere, as people – since the dawning of the Walkman – tune out their surroundings. What if, instead, your surroundings became soundtracks? That’s the question posed by a mobile app research project, partnering between New York’s Times Square and a creative team at the Georgia Institute of Technology. UrbanRemix […]

Ding dong, the score is dead… or not, in fact. Photo (CC-BY) Steve Snodgrass. There’s a peculiar false controversy going on at the moment over music notation. First, the blog for online (Flash-based) browser notation editor Noteflight introduced a manifesto: Music Notation Today, Part 1: A Brief Manifesto The essay by president Joe Berkovitz is […]

What started as an inside joke has become something of a compulsive faux pas: the Wilhelm Scream, a canned shriek that was first cleverly inserted into films as a wink and a nod between sound designers, has gotten a bit out of control. At least some sound designers are now disguising their Wilhelm Screams. But […]

Technologist magician Marco Tempest is back with another effort fusing traditional techniques and new gizmos. And I like how Marco celebrates Easter: not by painting eggs, but by filming them in motion on high-speed cameras. This time, he calls our attention to George Karger, a pioneer in high-speed photography and amateur magic – a pre-digital […]

Jonni Music, novelty music act for BBC Comedy, nails plenty of current music video cliches in “Walking in Slow Motion.” And it occurs to me we could use your help. Next time you come across a bland, dull music video, take note. Like field researchers tagging migrating ducks, we can begin to identify the whereabouts […]

Jonni Music, novelty music act for BBC Comedy, nails plenty of current music video cliches in “Walking in Slow Motion.” And it occurs to me we could use your help. Next time you come across a bland, dull music video, take note. Like field researchers tagging migrating ducks, we can begin to identify the whereabouts […]

illucia is a project at the intersection of lots of forms of goodness and imagination. The physical interface – what you see first in the image and video here – is a DIY modular controller, complete with Buchla-style patch cords and arcade buttons and pretty knobs. But while that might lead you to believe we’re […]

Max Mathews is best known for his involvement in the debut of digital synthesis, but he contributed much more. His Radio Baton predicted gestural controllers that arrived much later from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft, and it may be his code design ideas that outlast even the memory of the computer’s first musical utterances. Photo CC-BY-NC-SA) […]

As film makes a resurgence as a medium, music, too, responds with optical, chemical halos. Bibio’s music, sounding acoustically as if wrapped in a layer of warm gauze, was already partially cinematic. His new album for Warp, “Mind Bokeh,” is more tuneful and poppy, but as the name implies, it also draws directly from visual […]

As film makes a resurgence as a medium, music, too, responds with optical, chemical halos. Bibio’s music, sounding acoustically as if wrapped in a layer of warm gauze, was already partially cinematic. His new album for Warp, “Mind Bokeh,” is more tuneful and poppy, but as the name implies, it also draws directly from visual […]