GForce’s MAP is all new — it’s not a recreation or a collaboration with other brands. But this synth has been to history class, studying modular designs by Serge Tcherepnin, Random*Source, and Buchla USA. Put that in a very modern interface, add MPE expression, and you get what feels like Massive X or Serum from an alternate universe where they’re all about West Coast synthesis.

Who says the internet is dead? Not Freesound, the massive, community-run, fully free and open library of sounds from birdsong to samples. This incredible repository turns 20 years old today, and they’re celebrating with talks and a listening session. That includes organizer discussions of how to cope with AI and keep users’ needs central, and […]

Reports have been circulating that The Juilliard School is collaborating with OpenAI. One source says OpenAI is working with Juilliard students to annotate music scores for use as training. There’s just one important fact to know: Juilliard, the institution, has no involvement.

Odiv, a young composer from Ahvaz, communes in Shelâl with deeply felt darkness. It’s haunted not as a fetish, not as the pastiche musical surplus equivalent of a costume shop, as piles up in so much “dark” music. But it’s a horror that’s movingly personal. Maybe it’s time for tea and conversation with all our demons and ghosts. Out now on Zabte Sote.

It all starts with the envelope, so that even a few milliseconds of sound can generate “thousands of sonic trajectories.” Built entirely in the free, open-source Pure Data, Envion is a deep compositional playground. You can think of it like an algorithmic drum machine. Emiliano Pennisi shares his creation with us.

It’s long past time to start talking about scenes in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere not just like some exotic foreign treat, but dead-center in the history of hip hop experimentation. ZULI casually drops his second Habibi Loops for free, and it utterly slaps. To quote one clip, “that’s sick, man — that’s dope.”

Data Knot is the best of AI and machine learning: low-latency, optimized, performance-friendly, responsive — a set of building blocks for gestures and sounds that you customize. Built on the Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa) by composer/artist and self-described “crazy person” Rodrigo Constanzo, it’s something else musicians and artists love, too: it’s free.

With deeper support for Linux and high-DPI rendering, NAP, the expressive, low-latency, efficient framework for control and visuals, can now awe audiences anywhere. Visualization, sound, running electronics, whatever it is you want to throw at NAP, now you can do it better on Windows and Linux, including embedded platforms. And did we mention it’s free and open source?

OneLibrary to rule them all? AlphaTheta hopes so, with a new library format that works across software and hardware without conversion, and with all your playlists, cue points, beatgrids, and so on intact. That may sound like a tall order, but it’s already launching with support for Pioneer hardware, Rekordbox, Traktor, and djay Pro.

Against the backdrop of AL.FESTIVAL, the Berlin festival centering music from the Arabic world and diasporic communities, we gathered an expert group to discuss liberating technology from some of its Western biases and exclusionary design. Now you can listen back (and read more), with artists ABADIR and Basel Naouri plus Ableton’s Dr. Laurel Pardue, as chatter ranged from critical views of futurism to ways software can mesh with Indonesian gamelan.