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 […]

Three tablets – iPad 2, Motorola Xoom, and HP Touchpad. Improving like wine with age, or corked? Photo (CC-BY) Justin Ried. We’ve been watching tablets for some time now, looking for the perfect, mobile visualist performance tool. For the first time, those results begin to look genuinely promising. But here’s a surprise: it’s the Android-powered […]

We looked at the arc controller, and interviewed creator Brian Crabtree, early this year. In a way, the design is as much conceptual, kinetic sculpture attached to a computer as it is music hardware. It’s not for everyone, but it does inspire some sound designers and composers whose work I love, giving it a secondary […]

Charming, original hand-draw illustrations by Peter Jungers spice up the title. Sound and music for games is already a growing frontier for professional music careers; mobile, then, triply so. But with the expanded opportunities come unique challenges. Learning about them requires real-world experience, and short of word of mouth, that kind of knowledge is often […]

If you’re in the NYC area, we hope you’ll mark your calendar; if not, we have some free listening for you to explore below. Hacking and inventing, creative musicians are making and modifying the tools of their performance to express the music they imagine, with stunning variety of results. And so it is that once […]

Israeli funk musician and producer Kutiman, creator of the famed Thru-You, is back with an encore. Once again, he’s mixing the best performances of YouTube into a single video. Calling it a “mash-up” is perhaps unfair: this is really mix and remix. It’s no different than laying down multiple tracks in a studio, except that […]

Ready to cut the cord and go wireless? With mobile gadgets getting involved in music-making, it seems a logical solution – maybe not reason to throw away your MIDI cabling, but worth at least trying. Bluetooth could be an answer. In fact, it could work even without all those pesky, pricey mobile tablets and phones […]

Native Instruments has a new synth based on the Reaktor engine, and it’s one about which to be genuinely excited. Taking additive synthesis to a new conceptual level, it works with the concept of per-partial control but adds functions like wavetables, enveloping, and effects to each partial individually. The result is a synth that gets […]

Luz is a promising, surprisingly-powerful tool with a clean UI that lets you connect a huge range of inputs and generate visuals. It’s fully free and open source on Linux – possibly reason to try a Linux dual-boot for experimentation, even if you’re not a regular user. And now, a new release adds DMX support. […]

Connecting something to something else – it’s a basic principle of musical composition, of improvisation, of conversation. It’s therefore an essential feature of software, code, and digital music interfaces. But sometimes, it’s awfully nice to turn a knob and plug in actual, physical cord. Our friends Ben Hovey and Chris Stack are here with more […]