I’ve begun to dread the appearance of iPad jams in my inbox; you may feel the same way. When affordable digital synths were new in the 80s, there were various embarrassing videos as vendors like Casio showed off the new capabilities. Listen! Who needs a real trumpet when you can use a keyboard that sounds […]

Procrastinatus Part I from procrastinat.us on Vimeo. Procrastinatus Part II from procrastinat.us on Vimeo. A/V crew Procrastinatus send us their latest: it’s over an hour of a live set, fusing stylish silver-and-monochrome abstract visual loops with tightly-composed sounds. The project is the work of Emil Bardh, Olof Schröder, Emmanuel and Jonatan Moreno, working in the […]

Photo (CC-BY) JD Hancock. We users may sometimes gripe, but music technology gives us an impossibly wide variety for which to be thankful. From free (as in beer, as in freedom) to high-end and spendy, from software plug-in to acoustic instrument to solid-state electronics to toy, you’d run out of time and money long before […]

Tim Exile, laptop virtuoso, vocalist, and Reaktor software creator, has apparently taken a liking to the recording features SoundCloud is touting. He’s got a novel idea: you record samples into SoundCloud, he takes your samples and incorporates them into his set. It takes someone like Tim to pull that off; it should be a good […]

If it’s an iconic piece of hardware or software, there’s at least a decent chance you could be seeing it in virtual iPad form soon. Tascam’s Portastudio, released today, is a particularly striking example. The famed, budget cassette multitrack recorder, the box on which countless demos and quick songwriter creations was forged, appears on Apple’s […]

Photo: Frank Bry, courtesy his blog The Recordist. It’s winter in the Northern Hemisphere. For some of us, there’s little need to remind us of snow and ice. But if you fancy adding some frozen sounds to your music, we have both free samples and expert recording tips to help get your cold on. Frank […]

El Criollo – Interactive Installation from Hotpixel on Vimeo. Interactive technology is often celebrated for its ability to make visitors and onlookers into participants. Here, in a show in Mexico, that involvement is literal, as custom software weaves the words and faces of museum visitors into a portrait of the Mexican nation today. From the […]

Kinect Test @ /// Lazercrunk from /// *** this.riley *** \ on Vimeo. Spotted: Our friend Riley Harmon, experimenting with Kinect as a live performance tool in Pittsburgh, in what I expect will be the first of many such performances coming around the world. playing around testing the kinect @ brillobox pittsburgh Openframeworks.cc tuio.org/​ osculator.net/​ […]

Shop Vac from Jarret Heather on Vimeo. Jonathan Coulton is nothing if not a hero for the age of Internet music. The Brooklyn-based troubadour inspires worldwide adoration from fans, not least in the form of music videos made spontaneously for his songs. “Shop Vac” by Jarrett Heather is easily one of the cleverest music videos […]

Another gorgeous render by Stephan Gries. I could live in a virtual reality studio made by this guy. At the very least, Tyrell, the synthesizer dreamt up by readers of the website Amazona.de, will be realised in software form – and it might inspire a hardware module, too. That’s the word from Peter Grandl from […]