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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

The competition for your audio interface dollar is pretty heated these days, but MOTU’s latest – the Audio Express – packs a pretty impressive feature set for something costing US$449 list. It’s both a 6×6 audio interface and a mixer, with standalone mixer functionality so you can mix signals from the front-panel knobs without a […]

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit has become the Francis Ford Coppola of design documentaries (I expect a vineyard soon). His documentaries on type (Helvetica) and industrial design (Objectified) are glorious, intimate sources of visual inspiration. Now, he’s taking his quest to release a third film on cities to Kickstarter. And while Kickstarter seems to be the “it” […]

Let’s be frank. Computers really don’t demand any musicianship; they’re a blank slate with which you can do anything you like, and quantization is always close at hand. But bragging rights aside, whatever anyone else may think of the results, playing musical elements live can often be more satisfying. And it’s refreshing, at a time […]