The craft of photorealistic gaming has risen to astounding heights, but look-alike art direction can overshadow its technical achievement. Not so with an extraordinary-looking indie title called Hawken. The mech combat first-person shooter, built in the Unreal Engine, is crafted in a way that speaks to the possibilities of digital technique to spin imaginary worlds, […]

Capturing a work that’s designed to be generative is tricky, so think of this as a snapshot. Image (CC-BY) Dominic Alves. See the full set. Brian Eno’s ‘visual music’ paintings, 77 Million Paintings, are streaming live by way of a Berlin startup broadcaster called ikonoTV. That, in turn, makes a good excuse on a surprisingly-wintry […]

Capturing a work that’s designed to be generative is tricky, so think of this as a snapshot. Image (CC-BY) Dominic Alves. See the full set. Brian Eno’s ‘visual music’ paintings, 77 Million Paintings, are streaming live by way of a Berlin startup broadcaster called ikonoTV. That, in turn, makes a good excuse on a surprisingly-wintry […]

I think the first time I really understood handheld music making was when I first tried Nanoloop on Game Boy. While the more-popular LSDJ tracker is powerful, Nanoloop’s interface was unlike anything I’d seen before: aggressively minimal, it embodies in its interface design the feeling of a blank sheet of paper. Adding an idea feels […]

Photo (CC-BY) Chris M, of a Very Large Array. Number stations, making their appearance in the post-war radio landscape, were shortwave radio stations of streams of symbols, mysterious to their listeners and apparently code. Here, the idea of lost and indecipherable broadcasts inspires a wonderfully-varied collection of reflective artists, in a free, Creative-Commons licensed compilation […]

Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release? Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no […]

I’ve been following Maschine since prototype stages. The idea was at once obvious and welcome: build a software workstation, tightly integrated with pad hardware control, that fuses hardware sampler working methods with the on-screen flexibility of software. It’s software that focuses on working with sounds and patterns, outside the DAW-style metaphors. Of course, there’s one […]

The infamous FL Studio “giant screenshot.” Go ahead – eat up our bandwidth and have a closer look at what’s in FL 10, visually; click for the full-size version. FL Studio, aka Fruity Loops, has always been like opening a toybox of sound goodies for sound nerds – up to 30 instruments and 40+ effects […]

Through Thursday, March 31 at midnight, you can grab SoundToys’ Devil-Loc plug-in for free, concluding a giveaway that began at the TapeOp party at South by Southwest. Devil-Loc is a nice-sounding emulation of the Shure M62. Chris Conover, in thanks for a Record beta I sent his way, points to the offer, a code (which […]

There’s a special kind of genius that makes you transform any game system into a live visual tool. Whatever that force is, it’s strong with pikilipita. He’s build VJ software for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Park GP2X as well as the PlayStation 2, all released free. Now, he adopts the Korean game […]