Owing to a tradition that goes back to the first samplers and hip-hop pioneers, sampling and digital performance have become a kind of instrumental technique. You might play well, you might play poorly, but even working with samples, you can actually play. You can look at the simple design of the monome as the hardware […]

The beauty of physical, human motion is that just about anything kinetic, any gesture can work. If you were left only with motion in your toes, you could play a live set. And whereas these gestures were once tied to specific acoustic instrumental effects, in the digital realm, they can be anything. We’ve seen the […]

Musicians have long benefited from audio plug-ins; why not visualists and VJs? The FreeFrame plug-in format is the answer to that question, with broad support in favored visual apps like Resolue Avenue, Modul8, vvvv, Jitter, and others. All you need is some plug-in juice to feed them. Enter Marc Wren, whose new sfFreeFrame plug-in is […]

New ideas and invention are wonderful things – so long as you don’t have any illusions about cost and payoff, that is. So, with that cheeky headline, here’s Roger Linn. He writes us: I thought you might get a kick out of this and maybe some of your DIY readers might find it useful. Occasionally […]

Music notation is powerful because it’s a standard. You can share it between musicians and understand what it means. What if, instead of being confined to individual, platform-specific apps, digital controls for music were the same way? We’re not just talking a MIDI message here or there, either – someone could walk in with some […]

Adding to the list of homebrewed Kinect wonders, artist Mauritius Seeger writes to share his live video scratching rig, built with Kinect. It’s the first experiment, but already shows some great promise: hey guys, i just wanted to let you know about a kinect prototype/hack i’ve made to explore video scratching via hand movements. just […]

Electronic music is a gateway drug to electronic visuals for many the computer artist. Sound or pixel, everything is a number to the computer. So it stands to reason that Ableton Live, the ubiquitous live laptop music performance tool, would inspire interest in similar techniques for triggering visuals. Our friend Rucyl of the wonderful Saturn […]

Already making the rounds on the Web (as well it must, if it is to accomplish its author’s aims), a YouTube video immortalizes roll of film found against all odds in a snow bank. Upright Citizens Brigade video producer Todd Bieber, who found the roll, has turned them into a charming narrative as he looks […]

Natty Narwhal is the next release of Ubuntu. Now you could give it a soundtrack. Photo (CC-BY-ND) Ricardo Bernardo of, admittedly, vintage Ubuntu. Your OS is there, in front of you, daily – some of us for many, many hours a day. it often makes sounds at you, very rarely welcome sounds. Here’s an opportunity […]

This afternoon, I feel obligated to offer some explanation. Following my post about Julien Bayle’s LFO Everything module for Ableton Live, several readers and a forum thread on the Ableton Live forum raised concerns that a portion of Julien’s Device was adapted from another developer’s work without attribution. Heated discussion on the Live forum spilled […]