Motorola’s new flagship tablet. Photo courtesy Motorola. The iPad has a massive head start in software and a clear lead in design elegance, but in the tablet market, it’s no longer alone. As expected, this week’s Consumer Electronics Show brings a slew of tablets. Don’t call them iPad rip-offs, either. Given product development cycles, many […]

From comments (thanks, Charlie Cowper!), here’s a live performance by Japanese electronic artist Rei Harakami on nothing more than a 1990s-vintage multitrack digital workstation, Roland’s VS-880. (The VS-880 was introduced at NAMM in January 1996.) Harakami is a virtuoso on this machine, not simply playing back tracks but dancing through menus and settings and adding […]

Pay attention to those Angry Birds. They could be a sign of upcoming gigs, composers and sound designers. Photo (CC-BY) Johan Larsson. Composer/sound designer Ben Long has a resume of work on dozens of games. Here on CDM, he shares the topic on which he recently addressed GDC China: mobile. If mobile game audio is […]

Digital models and acoustic instruments have traditionally been studies in contrast. And instrument making has by definition been a craft and an art. But what if making an acoustic instrument was a matter of hitting “print”? That’s the question asked by MIT Media Lab researcher Amit Zoran. Using the Objet Geometries Connex500 3D printer, one […]

Out there on the wild frontier of Teh Internetz, you’ll find a seemingly-endless supply of tips and tutorials and videos. But the quality is, charitably, variable. The fine folks at Vimeo last month opened a “Vimeo Video School” to share techniques, and – appropriate to the higher level of quality control we see from the […]

Swedish developer Magnus Lidström is something of a virtuoso of music software, having worked with Propellerhead (Malström, etc.) and releasing his own unique µTonic (MicroTonic) and Synplant instruments. It’s been a bit since we’ve gotten new work from him – little matter, as I find his instruments tend to stand the test of time – […]

Dancing, digitally, anyone? Capturing full-body motion has tended to be imprecise and primitive, expensive, complex, non-real-time, or sometimes a combination. Rapidly-paced open source development around Microsoft’s Kinect 3D depth camera is proving the future doesn’t have to be that way. The results, piping control data in real-time to any visual, music, or other software, demonstrate […]

Dancing, digitally, anyone? Capturing full-body motion has tended to be imprecise and primitive, expensive, complex, non-real-time, or sometimes a combination. Rapidly-paced open source development around Microsoft’s Kinect 3D depth camera is proving the future doesn’t have to be that way. The results, piping control data in real-time to any visual, music, or other software, demonstrate […]

The first law of musical robotics: rock hard. We’ve seen plenty of robotic musical experiments, but finding a robot that can seriously shred is another matter altogether. Meet the robotic string instrument, Poly-tangent, Automatic (multi-) Monochord – let’s just call her PAM. Built by Expressive Machines Musical Instruments, a group of University of Virginia PhD […]

The jury’s still out about how many music producers will want to run desktop OSes on tablets. But here’s one thing that’s not in doubt: alongside dedicated mobile OSes like Android and iOS, you can expect to see tablets in 2011 that do the things your laptop does now. They’ll have standard ports (like USB), […]