Radio from the past, meet radio from the future. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Nic McPhee. Tired of top 40 hits? Pooped on podcasts? Sapped on streams? What if your radio could generative music that was never-before — and never-again — heard, all from dynamic, algorithmic software? PatchWork Radio does that with Pd patches. It’s not a new […]

I’m Superman! Uh… yeah, so there is some appeal to gestural interfaces for 3D navigation, I meant to say. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Open Exhibits; see note below. The absence of an official SDK has hardly discouraged experimentation and innovation with Microsoft’s depth-sensing camera for the Xbox 360. But Microsoft, via their research and strategy officer Craig […]

I thought the promo video from Elektron perfectly explained, in practical terms, how their recent Octatrack sampler works. You plug it in, push some buttons, turn samples into techno, and then everyone turns into squids and dies. (Hmmm… that does suggest something perhaps a future firmware update might want to address.) But it seems some […]

When it comes to playing a hand-built Fence Bass and recording it live, there aren’t hard and fast rules or techniques you have to follow. But musician, composer, and sound designer Diego Stocco can certainly make the mysterious timbres of his exotic instruments into evocative atmospheres. In “Dustland,” the performance and effects are all recorded […]

What happens when you try to make bleeping and beeping a business? Meet the Beep-It, a simple but addictive optical theremin, and a fun noisemaking impulse buy for sonic enthusiasts. Then, if you’ve ever fancied developing a new idea into a product, learn a little bit about the path of its creator. We hear a […]

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”300″]http://vimeo.com/20111796[/vimeo] Last week, guest writer Momo proposed a set of semantics and abstraction for making audiovisual collaboration more expressive – starting with ideas as fundamental as describing a kick beat. Now, he returns to show us what he actually means in his work, element by element. -Ed. This is the current version of […]

When I asked what albums readers were loving early in 2011, England-based James Blake’s full-length stood out in numerous reader comments. If you haven’t already seen him plugged on radio and online – and at least some of you haven’t yet – it’s a perfect time to check him out, with the full-length this week […]

A helmet and hand units make up the TRON performance system for a style of music artist Onyx Ashanti calls “beatjazz.” And he’s well on his way to making a reality. All images courtesy the artist. Onyx Ashanti is insane – in the special, essential way that makes certain brilliant musicians. An experienced busker, having […]

Benjamin Rabe, iOS touch artist and avowed fingerpainter, makes a simple but very cute experiment using touch apps. I like this, not so much for the novelty of doing this on iPhones and things, as for the potential it demonstrates in fun, little touch apps as artistic tools. Now I’ll really be pleased when you […]

Elektron’s Octatrack sampler is shipping to producer’s hands, bringing this multitrack, time-stretching, step-sequenced, modulation-packing digital sampling hardware to real-world music-making. The results make comparisons like “Ableton in a box” seem pretty fair – and give you more an idea of what the thing does than Elektron’s bizarre (and wonderful) short science fiction film, which seemed […]