Keyboard: The Minimoog at 40, and How A Legend Emerged from Spare Parts Bins

Minimoog, photo (CC-BY) Ricardo Hurtubia. The Moog Minimoog has turned 40 years old. I got to write the cover story for this month’s Keyboard Magazine, following the history of the keyboard. I chronicled the details of the original Minimoog’s evolution largely through the accounts of Bill Hemsath, the man who built the first prototype of […]

CBC Dumps Creative Commons; Non-Commercial Licensing to Blame?

I’m able to use this particular image as CDM is itself under a Share Alike license. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Andy Melton. I have no problem with copyrighting music. So I’ll be blunt: my ongoing impression of Creative Commons licensing is that you should either choose a license that allows for commercial use, or opt for traditional […]

Handheld Visuals: Lo-Res Animated Drawing Tool, and the Goodness of AIR for Android

Bridge Invaders Basics from Momo the Monster on Vimeo. Today, Adobe announced the availability of AIR apps in the Android Market. A quick refresher: AIR is Adobe’s runtime environment for Flash Platform applications. It allows Flash movies to run as closer-to-first-class citizens – they can get access to system hardware like the accelerometer, save/load files, […]

Unlogo Uses Computer Vision to Erase Logos from Your World

Unlogo Intro from Jeff Crouse on Vimeo. As the Internets work themselves into a kerfuffle over Gap’s laughably bad logo redesign, here’s a different tack: eliminate logos from your world. Developed by Jeff Crouse, Unlogo is an entirely open-source project that draws on Intel’s incredible computer vision library, OpenCV, to train computers to see logos. […]

Faces Traveling Through Worlds of Glitch, Geometry, and Particles in Darkstar Music Video

Darkstar: Gold from Evan Boehm on Vimeo. Armed with OpenFrameworks and other shared visual tools and code, plus After Effects and Cinema 4D, artist and director Evan Boehm leads a team to produce an artistry-packed music video for Hyperdub’s Darkstar. Faces are scanned, deconstructed, transformed into video signal, made visible from the inside out, and […]

Preview: The Circus of Lost Souls, in Progress, Marries Flash, Max, Ableton, More

Circus of Lost Souls *Sneak Peek from Momo the Monster on Vimeo. Animation as performance — our friend Momo gives us a little teaser of what has kept him hard at work. If you’re interested in visual work that bridges different tools, there’s some tantalizing stuff here. Have a look, and let him know how […]

Reclaim the Album’s Soul: Tips for Handmade CD Artwork, Make One Sunday

You hear the repeated chorus: music in the digital age has become meaningless and valueless, like turning on water from a tap in the middle of Rome. But, quietly, a movement is stirring that is reclaiming the value of music. Armed with nothing more sophisticated than markers, paper, collage materials, and imagination, they send mixes […]

Going Native: New Pro Tools HD Native, Your DAW, and Low-Latency Performance

For some time, the move has seemed inevitable – even more so as the rumor mill started echoing with suggestions that a native release was coming. But now, it’s happened: Pro Tools HD will now run without HD DSP hardware. And that’s not all — you can also use the same hardware with your existing […]

Take a Solar-Powered Tuner Wherever You Go, Says Tascam … But Environmental?

Sure, we spend a lot of time looking at far-out gear and high technology, but you have to tip your hat to practicality. Tascam’s TC-1S is a compact, portable tuner that you can take anywhere. Solar and USB power mean you never have to worry about powering it, either. Features: 12-tone equal-tempered chromatic tuner. Input […]