One top prize-winner: Stringer, which applied Kinect camera magic to simulated strings. More on how it was made below. Photo (CC-BY) Thomas Bonte. With Web data providers offering generous cash prizes and a strong emphasis on harnessing data to transform listening, music consumption took center stage at Music Hack Day’s debut in New York. But […]

Harrison is a company with a rich legacy in high-end consoles. Mixbus, their software product, is something of an anomaly. Its analog tape saturation, EQ, filter, compression, and mixing should be sold a la carte for a few hundred bucks each, given the usual business model in this industry. The product should run on some […]

Remix albums are ubiquitous, and sampling has become one of the fundamental techniques of electronic music. But how much do raw materials impact the end result? And given that a sample might simply be a prompt or starting point, why not take on someone else’s samples instead of your own? Film aficionados routinely trade film […]

Ed. Our friend Momo the Monster (aka Surya Buchwald) joins us for a guest column with a proposal: what if messages sent between music and visual software could be expressive? His idea is simple, but powerful: it’s musical semantics for live visual messages, as basic as knowing when there’s a bass drum hit. Momo introduces […]

From my inbox, Metaio is one of a growing number of “augmented solutions” vendors, experimenting in the realm of augmented reality. You can really think of this as a cluster of technologies for computer vision, Web-connected data, and 3D mapping. Metaio here touts that solution on the eve of the Mobile World Congress, as it […]

Traktor 2 is a new “generation,” says Native Instruments, of its flagship DJ software, along with upgraded hardware interfaces. The upgrade is so capable, simply calling it a “DJ” product may be inadequate. Just as Ableton Live’s user base grew to incorporate DJs, Traktor’s capabilities move easily into live performance and remixing, too. It’s still […]

Music production once meant getting into a studio. Portable multi-track tape and later the computer liberated us from that, and the “bedroom studio” was born. When capable Palm handhelds hit the market, musicians imagined yet more mobile means of production, and everything from Game Boys and PSPs to phones, even before the iPhone, have been […]

Mmmmmm … multi-dimensional. Photo (CC-BY) fdecomite Attention, 3D fans: OpenGL in the browser has gradually gotten real. WebGL is a browser-friendly API for OpenGL graphics, and it’s pretty darned close to OpenGL ES 2.0, which in turn will be familiar to anyone doing modern mobile 3D development. WebGL isn’t part of HTML5, but HTML5 makes […]

Mmmmmm … multi-dimensional. Photo (CC-BY) fdecomite Attention, 3D fans: OpenGL in the browser has gradually gotten real. WebGL is a browser-friendly API for OpenGL graphics, and it’s pretty darned close to OpenGL ES 2.0, which in turn will be familiar to anyone doing modern mobile 3D development. WebGL isn’t part of HTML5, but HTML5 makes […]

One keyboard, a mind-bending nine engines, lots of tech specs … now that we’ve lived in a world of impressive, technically-intimidating workstation keyboards for a couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine your eyes glazing over when there’s a new one, let alone the general public. So, what might get your attention? This. “Workstation keyboard” […]