Nashville’s skyline, ringed in smoke from a fireworks show, in 2008. Photo (CC-BY) Jim Davenport. Nashville is a special place for music, and just as any natural disaster in the world hits musical communities, so, too, has recent flooding taken its toll on this American city. The NAMM summer convention, a top gathering for the […]

Impossible motion magnet-like slopes from Ben Fry on Vimeo. To work with visuals and motion, you need to understand how visual perception functions, for the same reason that sound design is informed by understandings of how our hearing perceives space, frequency, timbre, and the like. So lately, I’ve been fascinated by this question in motion. […]

God bless you, 4/4. Yes, there’s still something about that four-beat, sixteen step bar that gets toes tapping and booties shaking and floors fouring on the… floor. So, when musician and maker Steve Cooley decided he wanted more physical control, he didn’t want some perfectly generic controls, and he didn’t want rows and columns. He […]

Octoloopy: a new Dr. Rex allows loading multiple loops, at last. But drum synthesis, sampling in Reason may steal the show. As I mentioned earlier today, the big news story in the Reason and Record announcements is that you don’t need Record to record; Reason now does sampling. Here’s the full look at what’s new […]

In case you haven’t seen already, Propellerhead is slowly doling out new feature information on its website for Record 1.5 and Reason 5. So far, they’ve announced pitch correction and vocal synthesis in Record (because we really don’t have enough AutoTune-style vocals in the world, apparently), multiple loop support in REX, and new block-style arrangement […]

Photo (CC) John Manoogian III. Wish you could make any track swing? Tristan Jehan, grad of the MIT Hyperinstruments Group and c0-founder of The Echo Nest, made that happen at San Francisco’s Music Hack Day. The Python code uses the Echo Nest’s sound-processing magic, available to the world via open Web APIs, in order to […]

One phone is … well, one phone. But now that many of us have smartphones, crowd-sourcing technology has far greater potential. A screen of a few inches, multiplied many times, can fill enormous spaces. And because the gadgets contain sensors and connectivity, they can respond more intelligently to proximity. A big hit of DroidCon here […]

Photo (CC) Till Krech. Forgive some seemingly train-of-thought connections between topics, but today is what I’d call a Nexus of Goodness while I’m traveling through Berlin. 1. Meetup tonight, starting at 7p. Tonight, if you’re in the Berlin area, we’re doing a little, informal meetup to get to know each other and talk Web tools […]

“The hills are alive / with the sound of browsers” Ever thought you’d make sounds in a browser, or have new ways of visualizing music playback? It’s happening, with builds of Firefox anyone can download. Work to make browsers rich with sound synthesis and visualization continues. “Compatibility” isn’t really an advantage yet, because Firefox is […]