How much can you do with a suitcase full of soundmakers? Quite a lot, as it happens. The 20th Century gave sound two great achievements. One was the successful modeling of filtering in digital software form. The other was the production of the electronic filter, first in quartz crystal form. Today, all of those advancements […]

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 […]

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 – 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]