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 […]

Pd and GEM, the free software cousins to Max/MSP and Jitter, are already known for visual programming via patching, but mainly for manipulating sound and video textures. Here, we see an entire 3D engine rendered, incredibly, as a series of patching objects. We saw a first look at what it could do last month: Truly […]

Ambivalent gets his hands on the DB4 for the first time – and doesn’t want to let go. Photo courtesy Allen & Heath, who snapped this while he was testing it out. Can a digital mixer change how you work and perform? After getting a hands-on introduction to one, globe-trotting electronic DJ Kevin McHugh, aka […]

Choosing a computer for production generally means choosing flexibility, the ability to more effortlessly combine lots of sound sources and techniques. So it makes sense that, given that Native Instruments’ Maschine promises to bring computer-style flexibility to hardware-style groove box and drum machine workflows, it should behave like computer software. And that has meant many […]

The Wobbulator from blair neal on Vimeo. Analog signal in video, as in sound, is a medium all its own – as we saw last week with the gorgeous LZX Industries modules (more on those soon, too). Here are more examples, both sent by reader Blair Neal. The Wobbulator has its own special place in […]

The Roland CMU-800-R, a rare computer music production accessory for the Apple II, in near-mint condition in Chris’ collection. Photos (CC-BY-NC) Chris Randall; used by permission. By day, Chris Randall makes great music software and blogs, but as his not-so-secret Micronaut alter-ego, he’s building a triptych of EPs on the theme of electronics. These aren’t […]