Aaron Koblin’s 2006 Flight Patterns was one of the works that helped people to understand how data visualization, in motion, could matter – and why Processing was a powerful tool for making data visual. That, in turn, landed the project everywhere from Wired Magazine to the Museum of Modern Art, and helped raise the visibility […]

Photo (CC-BY) Hryck. / Todd. Barcelona-based, Los Angeles-edited PublicSpacesLab is an example of what a netlabel can be. Instead of just another dumping ground for sounds, it feels like a well-curated cafe, pairing regular but thoughtful releases with reflections on music making. Everything is Creative Commons-licensed, free music, from a variety of artists spanning geographies […]

Jan Schacher at Sonic Circuits. Is the object to his left the best form factor for the situation – or not? (CC) IntangibleArts / Hawkins. The sight has become ubiquitous: if you’re hearing an electronic live act or computer DJ, there will be a laptop hovering nearby. The glowing logo of one fruit-themed computer brand […]

Cúpula sonora / Palacio Salvo from chindogu on Vimeo. Like a digitally deconstructed then reconstructed architectural fragment, VJ Chindogu’s Cúpula Sonora stands as an audiovisual object, with music by David Duchov. I like Chindogu’s term of “ephemeral sculpture” here, as there is a sense of that as the cupola pulses and vibrates. And while I […]

As touchscreens grow in popularity, let’s pause to reflect on the joy of the tangible, the physical. Juda (oneworldoneband.com) writes to share his rig coupling the Sega Arcade Controller for the Dreamcast game system with a computer. The ingredients: one terrific Sega game controller, one USB adapter, one Max/MSP app called MultiControl (runs via runtime […]

Grain Main Frame is a sound sketch, a one-off piece of software that loads audio files and plays them via several inventive, homebrewed sample players. Via granular techniques, methods of slicing sounds into tiny grains and then re-assembling them, a single sound can be stretched, sliced, and retriggered creatively. The software supports drag-and-drop functionality, as […]

Robots may not yet surpass the piano-playing skills of master musicians, but they can at least blow a few piano students out of the water. And the latest musical robots aren’t priceless models out of big corporate R&D departments. They’re hacked together from off-the-shelf toys, use cheap parts, and are assembled with instructions you can […]

Ernesto Aello, aka VJ Pr4, has made a really beautiful video showing TouchOSC in action on the Apple iPad, demonstrating the utility of the touch tablet as a control surface for live visuals. Takeaways: Yep, that big screen is great. OSCulator, as always, is fantastic. You don’t need OSCulator to use OSC – but developer […]

Photo (CC-BY-SA) Antonio Manfredonio. Editorial: When you use an image tag on a website, you don’t have to worry about whether it’ll be readable by all devices or whether some intellectual property lawyers could make it costly to use. Believe it or not, it wasn’t always that way, even with still images. Today, the problem […]

Image courtesy Machine Orchestra. Ed.: From modern electronica to South Asian Classical music, machines to humans, the Machine Orchestra is doing fascinating things with electrically-powered, digitally-manipulated, physically-robotic music. Here’s more about what makes the ensemble tick. It’s been nearly three months since I had the opportunity to guest blog here on CDM about a project […]