Electronic Music, Unplugged: Battery-Powered Jams and the Decade of Power

Photo (CC-BY) Anton Fomkin. No endorsement intended. (I like Energizer, too.) If the last decades in technology were about speed, this decade promises to be about power. I don’t mean horsepower: I mean power as in electricity. From concerns environmental to practical, power is now a real variable. After years of misreading Moore’s Law to […]

Richie Hawtin Teases Modular iOS Ableton Touch Control at SONAR

Well, I can’t quite see it, but this picture is really flattering. Come to think of it, I sometimes look a little better with a short depth of field, a sharp focus, maybe some haze over the lens. Yeah. That’s better. I don’t even need to shave. Touch performance control on devices like the iPhone […]

Diego Stocco’s Bassoforte, an Incredible Instrument Made from a Dismantled Piano

Diego Stocco – Bassoforte from Diego Stocco on Vimeo. Odds are you don’t have a dismantled piano you keep in the garden, awaiting conversion to a fantastic, imaginative electro-acoustic instrument. But that’s unlikely to make you covet the instrument above any less. Diego Stocco is a composer, instrumentalist, sound designer, and mad inventor. Among many […]

Connect the Bots: Black Allegheny, An Entire Album Made by Algorithmic Swarms

Swarm Music Album Black Allegheny from Evan Merz on Vimeo. We’ve heard albums made by singular compositional minds and by bands. What would an album sound like if composed by swarm intelligence, by computer evolutionary models of individual agents or bots? That’s the question asked by composer Evan Merz in his new, full-length album “Black […]

*Spark D-Fuser Official Announcement Video: The DVI Mixer Approacheth

If you’re a visualist, working with digital video, then shit is in the process of becoming real. Toby*Spark initially announced the “*Spark D-Fuser” Sub-$1000 DVI mixer project 8 months ago, and followed up with some more specifics. If you Follow Toby on Twitter then you will have seen some sporadic details and titillating photos appear […]

About Those Waves Vuvuzela Presets, Some Open Code, and Broadcasting Noise…

Photo (CC-BY) Bruce Turner. The explosion of interest in filtering out sounds of the vuvuzela has spawned some interesting discussions. Most amusing to me is the notion of some sort of anti-vuvuzela bias. The simple matter of the fact is, recorded (and broadcast) sound are not the same as the sound you hear when you’re […]

For Singers, Effects and Looping All in One Box

Singers often get left out, at least when compared to the toys heaped on guitarists and keyboardists. But vocalists looking to add effects and loop their vocalizations can now do so in one box, all attachable to a mic stand. TC-Helicon has an intriguing-looking gadget they’ve unveiled for vocalists, just in time for the summer […]

YouTube Adds Online Video Editing As You Upload; Great for Quick Demo Reels

Upload, edit – the two are back together again on YouTube. Google Operating System was sharp enough to notice the change. (Thanks, Lifehacker) Aside from the player interface, the whole interface makes use of HTML5, though it’s not as sophisticated as a former Flash-based “remix” tool that YouTube offered, then discontinued. (That seems to be […]

Guide to Vuvuzela Fever: Suddenly, Everyone Cares About Notch Filtering

Vuvuzela Orchestra Demo from Pedro Espi-Sanchis on Vimeo. It’s an extraordinary sporting event, one in which the spirits of the many nations of the planet come together, driven by a passion for one thing. No, not football. Notch filtering, apparently. It’s not very often geeky audio matters cross onto the mainstream radar, but such has […]

Virtual Reality: Guitar Notation, Amps, and Effects Appear on Apple Mobiles

Competing solutions from IK Multimedia and Peavey extend the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad with custom hardware for connecting a guitar. Here, the AmpKit LiNK, by Peavey and Agile Partners. All images courtesy the vendors. Ah, amplifiers and stompboxes. We hardly knew ye. Once exclusively the stuff of tubes, wires, cabinets, aluminum, and electronics, guitar […]