It may not look like it yet, but do some simple assembly, add included buttons and your own LEDs, put this into a housing, and you’ll have the cult hit monome grid controller for your music making pleasure. Open hardware means the ability to create exactly what you want. But it doesn’t have to intimidate […]

Chili – Sweet & Savory from Chili on Vimeo. Creating imaginative, inventive housings for musical instruments is nearly as old as the practice of making objects that make sound. Even in acoustic instruments, these additions often have nothing to do with sound – a viola da gamba doesn’t sound any better when it’s got the […]

Musicians have long made pictures to represent musical ideas, share those ideas, and allow others to participate. Before computers, we created scores. Now, we can create interfaces, too. Of course, just because you’re using a digital interface doesn’t mean the pencil as prototyping tool has to go anywhere. It’s the quickest way to sketch out […]

MAD MMX – Opening Title Sequence from Physalia Studio on Vimeo. 3D scanning and visual effects, the likes of which were popularized in Radiohead’s House of Cards video and open source code, are now more readily available to the masses than ever. Thank Kyle McDonald’s excellent DIY 3D scanning software, built in Processing. Resources, if […]

The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo. The Electro Wars Final Trailer from Stephen Alex Vasquez on Vimeo. Can a documentary finally tell the story of the electronic music scene? Primus Luta has become a scholar of electronic sounds himself, and joins us in a guest post to examine a film […]

Watching the bleeding edge of new musical instruments often means having to see new designs in tech demos, in proof-of-concept experiments as artists first try their hands on a new object. If you can use some imagination and see potential, that’s fine, but it’s a bit unfair to the instrument – you don’t get to […]

I hope you liked music while it lasted, because me and a bunch of nerds are about to replace it with … this. Photo (CC-BY) João Trindade Music celebrities have given CDM words to live by over the years — strange, yet strangely profound, reflections on the evils of modern technology. Sure, they’re trying to […]

Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that someone isn’t talking about the death of the album, replaced by singles. When they say “album,” however, they tend to mean “pop album,” using as their primary metric sales of the very top end of the spectrum. In electronic music, the album has never been about sales. […]

Moving over the face of the Earth Timelapse from Laww Media on Vimeo. Greetings, planet Earth. Remember when exquisite timelapse photography was the exclusive domain of expensive cameras, bottled up and sold by the likes of the BBC Motion Graphics library? Now a Canon SLR camera well within the reach of mortals is more than […]

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo. In an extended video that begins with Radio City’s Rockettes and kettle drum players, Stephen Ramsay explains a litany of technology’s most elusive topics, in terms anyone could understand — no, really. I dare you to ask anyone to watch a few clips of […]