More WebGL Fun: Use Shaders in a Browser, Play a Game with Fireflies

If your WebGL appetite still wants more 3D goodness in your browser, here are two additional examples since last week’s story. Via Tiago, Shadertoy is an in-browser renderer that allows you to edit shader code in GLSL (the basic language of an OpenGL GPU) and render it in-browser. The only bad news is that this […]

Tsutomu Katoh, Korg Founder and Chairman, Has Passed Away

From his well-deserved induction at Rockwalk. I was saddened to learn this morning that earlier today, Tsutomu Katoh, founder and chairman of Korg, passed away. He was a rare visionary, not only the founder of one of the great electronic instrument manufacturers, but – unlike the vast majority of his counterparts – someone who stayed […]

Mobile Recording with SoundCloud: More Powerful, Less Buggy, Android + iOS, FourSquare Locations

Photo (CC-BY) John Fischer/stickergiant. Sometimes things look interesting even before you can fully grasp just what they mean. Such is the case, I think, with what’s happening with SoundCloud’s on-the-go tools. Now, back in the beginning of this service, I predicted it’d become the Flickr of audio, and I wasn’t alone. But it’s becoming something […]

Circles and Euclidean Rhythms: Off the Grid, a Few Music Makers That Go Round and Round

Loopseque on the iPad. Courtesy the developer. We continue our 3.14 celebration with a round-up of circular logic. There’s no reason apart from the printed score to assume music has to be divided into grids laid on rectangles. Even the “piano roll” as a concept began as just that – a roll. Cycles the world […]

Flickr Find: Harmonic Patterns on a Playground

Photo (CC-BY) Jan Tik. We celebrate 3.14, PI day, with some selections of mathematics, music, and visualization… Sometimes the results resemble scores, sometimes toys, and sometimes – more rarely – real musical instruments. But part of why I love computing as a window into music is its ability to visualize music’s mathematical beauty. I happened […]

Pythagoras, Upcoming iPad App, Recasts Frets to Make them More Harmonic

To celebrate what in the US we call 3.14 or PI day, today I’m offering stories that deal with mathematics and circles. First up, an app named for the great philosopher who is credited – even if perhaps ahistorically so – with finding that ratio and ratios in harmonies. Technology has long introduced innovations that […]

A Moment of Reflection for Japan; How to Support Relief

(CC-BY-SA) Lloyd Morgan. We live in a fragile world, and I’m immensely grateful for the opportunities we’re gifted to share ideas about music making and engineering, sound and tools. I will continue our regular content, but I also want to ask all of our readers to reflect on our friends and colleagues impacted directly and […]

Renoise 2.7 Adds Sample and Slice Savvy; Tips and Inside Info from the Developers

Who says we should have only one set of assumptions when it comes to how music software should work? Renoise remains a vision of an alternate reality where mod trackers – musical editors with vertical, pattern-based views instead of horizontal, linear piano roll views – are our present and future. And Renoise keeps getting better […]

Joys of OpenGL in a Browser: WebGL 1.0 Release and Dev Goodies, and Play with Fractals Right Now

It’s a great time to be coding 3D – and a great time to be destroying your workday playing with 3D – thanks to free and open resources for OpenGL, now even in the browser. If lovers of 3D dreamt up a standard for getting hardware-accelerated 3D in a browser, they’d have a tough time […]

A Gorgeous Compilation Benefits Cancer Research; Co-Creator Explains

“Gem Drops” is a rich, varied compilation covering “experimental electronic hip-hop inspired” music, with artists such as Anenon, yuk., Juj, Devonwho, Shigeto, and Sumsun. The 21 tracks were selected by curator Aaron Meola. It’s the sixth release from the collective Dropping Gems, and 100% of revenue will go to the American Cancer Society. Pay what […]