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 […]

From label to physical shape to the boxes they come in, these beer bottles have been reimagined for musical aims. Cheers! All images courtesy the artist, Matt Braun. What if blowing tunes on beer bottles was raised to the level of musical science? Through even the mundane medium of packaging, design can transform the everyday. […]

CC-BY-NC-SAFrancesco Lodolo. Addendum to the previous story: an “end user” and an “application” are not the same thing. Watching comments from some users dumping on Firefox and Opera because they don’t understand this is painful. Watching it come from journalists is even more so. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what today’s announcement […]

CC-BY-NC-SAFrancesco Lodolo. Addendum to the previous story: an “end user” and an “application” are not the same thing. Watching comments from some users dumping on Firefox and Opera because they don’t understand this is painful. Watching it come from journalists is even more so. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding about what today’s announcement […]

The good news: a lot of “broadcast” Internet video is free forever on AVC and H.264. The bad news: everything else still costs money, not much else changes, and you can expect the next battle will be a protracted patent debate. Whee! Photo (CC-BY) Bill Jacobus. MPEG LA, the group that holds the patent pool […]

Handmade Music is a community get-together, Science Fair, noise-making happening, and party for people making things that make music. We return to NYC on Sunday, August 29 at 7p. Our new Manhattan home is Culturefix, a new electronics boutique, gallery, and tapas bar on the Lower East Side. This month, we welcome a classically-trained guitar […]