Photos above: Jennifer Meagher, with additional photography by myself. Handmade Music found a new home on New York’s Lower East Side, at Culturefix, an electronics boutique cum gallery, bar, and tapas. The philosophy of this event has long been to simply open the doors, letting a community of people come together, make some noise, and […]

Soundhack, the free audio tool for the Mac developed by audio wizard Tom Erbe, was long a beloved tool for doing strange and wonderful things for sound. It was followed by Spectral Shapers, Mac and Windows plug-ins that built on some of those ideas to do more “timbral morphing” with recorded audio. That includes “timbral […]

Exploring granular sound on the iPad in the application Curtis. Image courtesy the developers. Named for Curtis Roads, Curtis is an iPad and iPhone/iPod touch application that implements granular sound processing – a technique, imagined early on by the composer Xenakis, which divides sound into tiny granules, allowing more liquid modification of the audio. Roads […]

The original M1, definitely larger than a DS. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Kevin Phillips. Having made their own DS-10 instrument, Korg and DS developer AQ Interactive yesterday presented something new for the handheld Nintendo. This time, they’re revisiting one of the all-time greatest hits of digital synthesis, the Korg M1 workstation. Markus Schroeder tips us off that […]

Sniff from karolina sobecka on Vimeo. Right on cue, after mentioning that game engines like Unity can become powerful tools for live and interactive visuals — not just digital “games” in the conventional sense — here’s an example, via the Unity Twitter feed. SNIFF, by Karolina Sobecka with software development by Jim George, combines the […]

Unity, the commercial game engine, has long been a development tool of interest to those working not only in games but other live and interactive 3D visuals. In contrast to traditional tools, Unity is simply friendlier to designers and programmers alike. It’s what you’d imagine a game engine to be. After first attracting developers on […]

STOPMOTION 2.0. Controlado en directo por sensores from Rubén Fernández on Vimeo. Madrid-based artist Rubén Fernández sends along his most recent project, which layers stop motion video with novel live control. The material itself is composed of stop motion footage produced with everyday materials, most notably beer and soda cans. The stop motion footage was […]

Nearing the release of Unity 3, the popular multi-platform game engine, the dev team offers thoughts on what excites them most in the upgrade. Amongst those features are some tasty introductions in sound. Real-time audio features could make Unity an appealing environment for people working on experimental 3D interfaces for sound or adding more interactive […]

Photos courtesy Spin Semiconductor. I was stunned last week to learn of the death of Keith Barr, the founder of Alesis and a beloved, legendary engineer of music technology. He was 61. An analog engineer gone digital, he led the charge to make digital reverb and studio recording affordable, and even after his Alesis years […]

Pauk (Pau Cabruja) using a Monome 256 attached to a guitar strap, photo by Lara Jaruchik. Courtesy monome Community Tour The monome is coming to your town. Unlike tours organized by commercial product vendors, a grassroots effort by monome users pledges to share the music made with the monome and give back to a larger […]