The march of “because you can” experiments with the new generation of Web browsers continues. Last week, we saw real-time synthesis in the browser from a team at Mozilla. Next up: music notation. Mohit Muthanna has executed a gorgeous example of musical notation using HTML5’s Canvas. (The Canvas is a new feature of the Web […]

Photo courtesy Guitar Center. They describe the scene: “A shattered Kay acoustic guitar (Circa late 1950’s or early 1960’s) sits on the floor of Soundcheck Nashville, waiting to be assessed for damage.” Wherever they occur in the world, disasters’ material impact can be nearly as emotionally and personally challenging as loss of life. Floods in […]

Just how awesome is the GPU? So awesome. (That’s how we put it in highly technical jargon, anyway.) You’d be forgiven for being skeptical of what photorealistic rendering’s future might be. After all, we’ve been hearing about how raytracing and better-looking, more realistic renders would someday revolutionize 3D visuals, and that, thanks to the GPU, […]

The sounds are alien and twisted. The user interface looks like engineers from Boeing and the Klingon homeworld got together to collaborate on a new spaceship cockpit. It can only mean one thing: GrainCube is here. Built on sound designs and conception by sonic renegades Richard Devine and Josh Kay (Devinesound), with development by Rick […]

The miracle of human hearing goes well beyond audiophile snobbery over “high fidelity,” or the machinations of sometimes-arbitrary, designed-by-committee industry specifications. But, in the context of my rant about perceived myths in audio, what can we hear, really? And how much perceptible sound can you squeeze into an MP3? For his master’s thesis at the […]

Photo (CC) Alosh Bennett. With the regularity of clockwork, stories about how digital audio consumption is degrading the quality of music are published and then re-published. Nearly a decade after the introduction of Apple’s iPod, this still apparently qualifies as news. The content of the articles is so identical, you could believe the bylines are […]

Used as a traditional painting device, the iPhone and iPod touch aren’t terribly impressive, reducing the interaction to a kind of simplistic finger painting. (Ditto any touch device, really.) But attach dynamic, generative brushes to your fingers, and the act of painting digitally is transformed. Behind the scenes, it’s not the software or the technology […]

Whether your trade in audio is in soundtracks for screens and games, or you’re just exploring strange, new worlds and seeking out new life and new timbres in your music, the discipline of sound design is as rich and deep as cooking. It’s something you can do every day. Okay, now just put that “cooking” […]

Wait for it… It’s a sculptural monument to waiting and the wait cursor, controlled by an iPad. This doesn’t count as the first iPad-controlled art, as I was part of a show last month on that theme; documentation of that soon. But is a fascinating homage to an iconic image of our age, and time […]