RichardL notes some potentially major news this afternoon. Shortly after my post, Steve Jobs himself reportedly answered an open letter written by free software advocate Hugo Roy. Hugo’s letter contained suggestions about whether a standardized unencumbered video codec needed to accompany the video tag in order to be truly “open.” The original post, on “hugo’s […]

Photo (CC-BY) Steven Depolo. Editorial Misdirection is an art practiced by magicians by which an audience’s attention is diverted from one place to another. What’s brilliant about it is that it’s not a lie. Indeed, the audience has to participate for it to work. We, the audience, watch the right hand instead of the left, […]

Walter Sear addresses the AES convention in 2001. Photo courtesy the Audio Engineering Society, used by permission. It’s the end of an era: pioneering synth guru, engineer, sound designer, instrument importer, composer, producer, and owner of the landmark Sear Sound recording studio in New York has died at age 79. Sear’s career covered almost everything […]

VISION from Drasko Vucevic on Vimeo. Musician Drasko Vucevic of Barcelona and Toronto sends us this lovely bit of work. It’s a real tank of water, real oil, shot real-for-real – then manipulated to heck. What’s interesting to me is that the process for the sound design mirrors the process for the visuals: recordings of […]

Cymatic ripple from flight404 on Vimeo. It’s a beautiful age emerging for people making art with code. Tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks are as much about a philosophy and way of life as a specific tool. They’re not only about free and open code, but lightweight syntax, pulling together libraries that make media “just work,” […]

Via the Pd announce list, a class of students are doing some pretty sophisticated experiments in design and interaction using Pd. I tend to have my own students focus on Pd for sound-making (since it naturally lends itself to signal flow) and use Processing for visuals (some are also using OpenFrameworks), but I’m impressed with […]

Osmos, the game that couples particle physics-based, absorption gameplay with a beautiful soundtrack (available in near-entirety here on CDM for free), continues its march to new platforms. iPhone and iPod touch users will soon get a handheld version, and a free port to Linux means you can play the desktop game on all three desktop […]

You’ve heard the lamentations before: album art died with the move from the large canvas of the LP vinyl record to the CD. Well, eat your heart out, LPs: album art is back, it’s interactive, and it’s trippier than ever. Just ask Flying Lotus. Fieldlines is a free Mac and Windows application that creates an […]

Apple’s iPad-to-VGA Dock Connector adapter hasn’t exactly been a home run for consumer end users, who have been disappointed to discover that applications don’t mirror to the output automatically and DRM-ed content won’t play. That has caused the device’s ratings to plummet on the Apple Store, and Engadget had this to say: Apple iPad Dock […]

NAB ’10 – Vericorder 1st Video from Hand Held Hollywood on Vimeo. You probably don’t need anyone to sell you on this dream: imagine editing videos on the road, without a computer. That’s the promise of Vericorder, an iPhone app Hand Held Hollywood captured at the NAB conference. (Found via Palm Sounds, which of late […]