Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

Photo (CC-BY) Marcelo Braga. Roger Ebert is not a person with whom I’m accustomed to being in agreement. His position on whether games are art seems laughable for someone who makes Hollywood his living, attacking a medium rather than the content made in that medium. But kudos to Ebert for bringing to light the insight […]

Practical iPad Music Making: Connecting Hardware What’s this MIDI thing about? Creatively, music is about assembling a new whole out of lots of pieces. So it makes sense that in a music workspace, making connections is important. Like traditional computers before it, part of what makes the shiny, new iPad musically useful is its ability […]

“din is noise” is a newly-updated “tone board,” making the rectangular plane of its screen into a field of sound you can transform. The video above just begins to show some of what it can do. Pixels can be tones, transformed onscreen. A resonator editor uses Bezier curves to edit sounds across octaves. Each resonator, […]

As with music, there’s not really a dominant style of live visuals or audiovisuals; it ranges from the ambient and generative to Emergency Broadcast Network-style A/V cutups. DJ Yoda is an A/V mash artist in the traditional mold, but the results are nothing if not diverting. They’re quite simply fun, and the fact that the […]

The Gallolizer is a handmade multi-effects sound mangler, an array of dirty, delicious sound-destroying effects in a single handcrafted box. It’s the work of a Spanish engineering and art collective called MP19, an Arduino-loving, free software-using, open source group of artists who turn those platforms into the kind of grungy sounds that make them happy. […]

Chris Stack, now no longer with Moog Music, is instead spending his time putting out a terrific series of demo videos in which he combines a dream studio of Moog gear. In the last one, we saw him producing stereo ring modulation — and see comments, as someone did take up my challenge to do […]

Photo (CC-BY-ND) tianhua. Record an album in the month of February, and have it in the mail by March 1: that’s the RPM Challenge, and so far, some 6,000 acts have already delivered. Nathan Groth writes us with details (and apologies for late posting here, since that means you have… less time). Long time reader […]

In the northern hemisphere, it’s winter. Really. Here’s today’s winter storm warning for the New York City area, as composed by the bards of the US government’s NOAA National Weather Service: SNOW…TRANSITIONS TO A WINTRY MIX OF SLEET…SNOW AND FREEZING RAIN AROUND MID MORNING…AND CONTINUES FOR MUCH OF THE DAY BEFORE BECOMING A PERIOD OF […]

Hindsight normally gives perspective to history, but in the case of the 20th Century, even looking back, it’s hard to fathom the sheer magnitude of change in human thought and technology. Composers faced the twin revolutions of electronic sound — recorded, synthesized, and eventually computerized — and new systems for organizing pitch and rhythm from […]