It’s almost impossible to come upon an electronic musical colleague – indeed, regardless of their personal genre – without some lament of the state of dance music. But electronic sound has long depended on the connections between experimental and dance, all the vibrations that can move people. Don’t complain – do something. Reaching across national […]

COLORFLEX, developed in Reaktor 5, offers a fascinating take on matrix sequencing. It’s just a sequencer, not something that makes noise itself – it sends notes, Control Change, and IC send – but what a sequencer it is. Color zones act as different “tracks” of material, allowing complex patterns to be layered atop a single […]

Apple today refreshed its MacBook Pro line in a long-awaited update, moving the Apple laptops in line with recent advancements in Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. There are some caveats when you pull apart the line, however – the 13″ models miss out on the new CPUs in this lineup, at least – and you’ll […]

If it’s not already “viral”, I’m sure it will be soon. Less than a year ago, Casey Pugh – then a developer at Vimeo – invited people to join him in remaking Star Wars, 15 seconds at a time. The final scene was completed on the 25th of February, and they’ve just released “The Escape”, […]

One of the most beloved tools in Nintendo DS homebrew has become free software, under the GPL v3. Talk about restrictive platforms – the DS requires special hardware just to get this app to run. But even with a couple of people involved in development, that could mean better, more frequent updates. I also wonder […]

Pictured: Looks native, but this app is built with a cross-platform library. And really, for music making – or great, immersive development, in general – does it matter? The iPad has inflamed plenty of passions online. On this site, I’ve gotten a little flak from iPad lovers and haters alike. It goes something like this: […]

A beautifully assembled live promo for visualists CSTNG-SHDWS collaborating with Nonagon. CSTNG-SHDWS x Nonagon Live Video/Audio from Colin Sebestyen on Vimeo. I found this totally spellbinding, so I asked Colin Sebestyen of CSTNG-SHDWS for some more detail about the project, and he replied with some great information on preparing visuals, performing live with sound-makers, cutting […]

LiveControl for the iPad/iPod from ST8 on Vimeo. It’s fun watching projects progress. Since we covered control of Ableton Live with the iPad – noting a few of the early wrinkles in the setup – we’ve gotten new reports as people work out more efficient systems. And incidentally, if you don’t own an iPad, or […]

Works For Turntable from Stephen Cornford on Vimeo. Digital sound, and electronic sound in general, can become abstract. In fact, sound itself can be abstract. So there’s something beautiful about rendering sound as something kinetic, mechanical, and physical. Watch the hypnotic works by Stephen Cornford, top; as the video progresses, the pieces deepen in subtlety. […]

And yes, there’s even built-in control surface support for the Wiimote. I have to give that a try to figure out how the heck that works. Why wait for The Future, when you can have a full-featured DAW that supports OSC (OpenSoundControl), right now, today? That DAW turns out to be Ardour, the open source […]