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), […]

An unseen, imagined world is becoming as accessible to today’s generation as the typewriter or graphite pencil was to a generation before. Geometrical theory, in two and three dimensions, has been illustrated for many centuries. But now, we can play with those geometries in our own finite world, as liquid and changeable there as they […]

What good is a sound app on a phone or iPod, really? Just ask a Filtatron user. As with plug-ins and desktop software doodads, I find out of the sea of apps on iOS, a tiny handful are genuinely useful. But those select few can prove indispensable. I would count the Moog Filtatron in that […]

Transcription: Digital circuits are made from analog parts. No further comment. Via the wonderful Rucyl, artist and blogger of Saturn Never Sleeps. Both her Tumblr and the blogging she does for SNS are terrific spots to visit when you feel stuck for creative energies. That to me is the Web at its best: directed procrastination, […]