iPad meets Mac, new generation meets, old – what next? Photo (CC) Hassan Hodges. Steve Jobs is threatening to destroy the Internet. And it’s not even his fault. No, I’m not talking about whether or not the iPad supports Flash. I’m talking about the new propensity of various analysts to redefine computing, technology, and apparently […]

We’ve lived so long with a musical world dominated by the piano keyboard that it can be hard to look beyond it. But for some time, musicians have desired a set of common requirements for what might replace it: The ability to hit specific pitches in a convenient layout, perhaps one more convenient than the […]

Arkaos Grand VJ Ohm64 Template from Livid Instruments on Vimeo. What’s your favorite controller of choice for live visuals? Jay Smith from Livid points us to this lovely use of their Ohm64 controller, right out of the box with ArKaos’ GrandVJ audiovisual software for Mac and Windows. It’d be great to see some of this […]

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 […]