She’s a composer, a sound designer, a performer, and a violinist; she’s recognized as an expert in Ableton Live and has worked with artists ranging from Cirque du Soleil to Kanye West. But now we really get to hear Laura Escudé’s musical vision as a complete picture in her debut album this year, Pororoca. That […]

Seven Mantas from bar|none on Vimeo. You’ve got fingers. Those fingers are incredibly sensitive and expressive with pressure, which can translate to music. Happily, touch panels and velocity sensitivity can coexist, as we saw yesterday. There’s more where that came from. bar none points us, via Twitter, to work he’s doing with Ableton Live-controlling patch […]

AV Clash – Tag Mash from Video Jack on Vimeo. What if you could witness the birth of life at a microscopic level in some alternate, digital universe? And what if it made a deliciously-raunchy racket? That’s the sense I get looking at AVCLASH, a free audiovisual interactive artwork built in Flash that runs in […]

Visuals for live performance require a lot of the same things over and over again – media loading and browsing, crossfades, effects… Vizzie is a set of macro-style add-ons for Max/MSP/Jitter, free to current users, you can drop into any patch. Very cool, and they look very nicely designed. Read some praise for the plugs […]

On Melancholy Hill – NYC Lights from Chateau Bezerra on Vimeo. The fact that computers and digital media can generate anything can be an added incentive to peer out into the physical world around you. So Chateau Bezerra, a CDM reader who was lucky enough to win some software from us previously in a giveaway, […]

Keyboards have worked for centuries, but they restrict continuous expression and pitch. Touch is more flexible, but most readily-available touch controllers (like the iPad) lack pressure sensitivity. That leaves ribbon controllers. When do you don’t have quite what you want, you make your own. Just ask Rasmus Nyåker of the Copenhagen Noise Lab. Rasmus writes […]

Vintage radio equipment, ca 1957, (CC-BY) the Seattle Municipal Archives. Oliver Chesler and his Wire to the Ear blog have long been among my favorite reading on the Web. It turns out he and I have both been pondering the idea of doing an audio podcast to talk about trends in music and technology. After […]

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo. When Microsoft gobbled up vision technology and announced they were channeling their own research into a product for their game console, artists, researchers, and hackers lamented. It seemed the tech might be destined only for a handful of mainstream game titles. Hours after the […]

Ben X Tan writes to let us know he’s working with hacks for Microsoft’s Kinect 3D camera system for Xbox to perform MIDI control. Result: depth-sensing, gestural musical manipulations! It’s just a prototype, but since today I cover the larger landscape of what’s happening with Kinect, it’s well worth teasing. From the description: Coded in […]

Open source for the sake of it is one thing. This is open source hardware and software for the sake of making lighting more awesome. Open source hardware is the basis of a sophisticated, wireless lighting rig. It’s already syncing to music with Pd, and automatic lighting control right from free DJ software may be […]