Syphon Teaser from vade on Vimeo. In the audio realm, piping audio and MIDI between apps is commonplace (see ReWire, JACK, Soundflower, IAC MIDI, etc.). But imagine if you could take textures and frames from one app and share them, live and real-time, with another app. That’s the vision of Syphon, a Mac-only, open-source framework […]

Mapping projections to shapes other than rectangles should be an essential technique, but while live visualism and VJing are all about being improvisatory, the process can be laborious. Enter an elegantly-designed tool that makes the whole job easy, distorting your projected image to any shape you like with the aid of keyboard and mouse shortcuts. […]

The quickest route to expressing an idea remains the gesture of a hand. That gesture may be crudely interpreted through today’s touch displays, but the immediacy remains. Presumably because of some of the device’s limitations, a lot of the experiments with the iPad have involved controllers that operate independently from sound software, like a remote […]

(CC-BY) Stefan Lins. I’ll be in Stockholm the week of 27 September, speaking at Stockholm’s Android Only conference Wednesday/Thursday 29-30. I’m particularly excited by the lineup, because it emphasizes pushing the envelope of Android and cross-platform development. I’ll talk about how Processing for Android can allow “sketching” audiovisual apps on mobile. Martin Roth of RjDj […]

Trigger, mix, effects… there are certain things you need to do as a visualist, and the combination of buttons with faders and encoders on the Ohm64 controller from Livid was clearly designed by visualists. The monome-style grid does indeed lend itself well to triggering, but you also need parameter control for mixing different channels and […]

Let’s face it: a lot of people ignore the four-deck features of Traktor. But for those who exploit that power, and who are willing to invest in a high-end, boutique design, here’s the controller for you. Faderfox has long been respected for making boutique-quality MIDI controllers for DJing and Ableton Live performance. The previous Faderfox […]

The svelte compactness of a laptop poses a challenge for computer musicians: how do you play the thing? A typically-sized music keyboard kills the laptop’s portability and small footprint. That makes a compact keyboard a no-brainer. This month, both Alesis and Korg have new compact offerings, each USB-powered, small, and cheap. And as a side […]

Augmented City 3D from Alpha Ville on Vimeo. “Visionary Cities” is described as “an international moving image competition in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, Vimeo, FilmDirecting4Women.” The competition, hosted on Vimeo, will close voting at the end of this week from five top picks that imagine cities of the future. Through Friday, “Like” one of […]

UK-based Novation are known these days mainly for making MIDI controller keyboards for computers, but the company first made its name in synths. Novation’s virtual analog synths were beloved for their distinctive sound, accessibility – both in price and ease, and compact design. And some of that legacy, frankly, has been missing in recent years, […]

mtn, at work in his bedroom studio, in medium-format film glory. All photos courtesy the artist. Artists and engineers, coders and musicians – maybe once these were perceived as separate cultures, but today, you can find people tap-dancing across the categories with ease – people like Adam. Adam Ribaudo, aka makingthenoise, is known in the […]