Sometimes, DIY music boxes reach moments of mad genius. To me, they’re almost a kind of compositional conceptual art, executed as a set of circuitry and disguised as a piece of music gear. They assemble in series a set of solutions to design problems, but result in something – through the combination of invention and […]

Touch DJ, one of the early DJ entries on iOS. These apps could tie more closely into iTunes libraries on the device, broadening their appeal. Photo (CC-BY-ND) William Brawley. Following mobile music making means keeping up with technical details that are complex and changing. And because the Internet is open, when you post a story […]

A little stretch of desk, a couple of monitors, and a copy of the free and open source DAW Ardour running on Linux, (CC-BY) wstryder / Lauri Rantala. (Note: this is presumably Lauri’s studio, and is certainly not mine, seeing as I can’t play the guitar, and thus recording the results of me playing a […]

As a consumer market fails to embrace Blu-Ray and audiovisual options become more complex, if only we had Devo and Ray Charles to guide us through our purchasing decisions. (Alternatively, we could have the folks at Best Buy dress up in Devo’s creepy eyeball masks, but maybe that’s cruel.) Devo Demonstrates LaserDisc – 1984 [Retro […]

Developers for iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad have long complained about lack of access to the iTunes library, the file store and metadata for uploaded files. While version 3.0 of the OS provided limited playback capabilities (play/pause/stop), it was a far cry from what you’d need to build a DJ or other music […]

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 […]