David Byrne discusses at TED the influence of architecture and venue on musical activity. (I saw him give an extended version of the same talk, with discussion, at New York’s Center for Architecture.) It’s a question that’s especially relevant to electronic music, I think, as digital music has been a big confused about its venue, […]

Nope, you’re not hallucinating. Whatever line there was between playing Rock Band as a game and playing Rock Band as musical instruments has now more or less evaporated with the release of Rock Band 3. Yes, there’s a keyboard, and yes, you can add a strap to it, if that makes it a keytar for […]

Before digital projectors, before even the film projector, there was the world’s simplest projection tech: light source, shadow. From the traditional Indonesian art of Wayang shadow puppetry to modern artists scrounging used overhead projectors as they are retired from schools, the medium is as rich as ever. Electronic musician Mira Calix (Warp) uses cast shadows […]

Ready for some superior German engineering in your controller hardware? Before the APC or the Launchpad, before the Kontrol X1 from NI, Faderfox was the underground, boutique choice for controllers. “Professionally” made in Germany, the devices really are little tanks. They have incredibly solid-feeling buttons and knobs, and as opposed to the sprawling form factors […]

(CC-BY) Windell Oskay. Wanting something is different from needing something. And bending something to musical activities is different from requiring something for musical activities. Apple introduced a promising-looking update Monday to the iPhone. I didn’t really see much reason to talk about it, because there’s nothing specific in the update to music, even if it […]

Now that digital technology allows rapid creation of new interfaces for music and sound, the question of how to represent those elements visually has new life. But whether digital or not, practitioners of music have long been interested in applying further descriptions to music, from the Baroque Doctrine of Affectations to the involuntary association of […]

The grooves are fun, but the generated names for the groove are even more so. Need a new band name, anyone? Generative: the rhythmic frontier. These are the voyages of the starship MicroTonic. Its online mission: to explore strange new grooves, to seek out new beats and new musical cultures … Yes, Patternarium, by software […]

Anyone working in visuals is likely to develop a voracious appetite for video footage. So even though a phone will never be the optimal device for capture, having an always-present, lightweight, low-cost gadget is still a good thing. The problem is, with the exception of gadgets like Nokia’s premium N95, most phone’s camera features have […]

Steadicam hardware is a beautiful thing. But what if you’re on a budget and want a quick hack to improve your self-shot footage – a good thing if you, say, have a VJ gig coming up and need to make some new footage? DIY solutions have stepped in. The latest, and it looks quite nice, […]

Ander sends us his creation, “Station,” a brilliant-looking MIDI controller built on the ucapps.de hardware platform. It could easily have qualified for the kinds of designs in the dreams competition – except he went ahead and made it. He filled it in with RGB LEDs, touch pads, and new SMD-based hardware. The impact of the […]