Could busking – street music performance – be a tool for social change? It’s an idea I’ve heard artists mull before. Here’s one opportunity to do just that next month, in April, in support of building badly-needed school facilities in southern Zambia. And yes, digital musicians can participate, thanks to terrific, affordable, battery-powered amplification. I […]

Lovely layouts, but it raises the question: will we increasingly see software that simply looks like this, so that the touch controller and soundmaking software are one and the same? The iPad could have its first killer controller app, if you like the looks of midipad. While just a series of screenshots at this point […]

Austin is whirling with South by Southwest excitement, so why not make some swirly radio noises? Yes, Handmade Music Austin does have a big blowout party in the midst of South by, with a huge music lineup. Wish I could be there, gang, but I’ll be staying here in NYC. On the docket: FREE performances […]

Can you hack it? Yes. Yes, you can. Screenshot (CC-BY) Hens Zimmerman / 37Hz. Even before Max for Live was available, hackers had found a way of interacting with “secret” APIs inside Live for custom control, allowing them to customize Live’s behavior and make it work more seamlessly with hardware. That included providing something Ableton […]

Record giant Universal Music Group is cutting prices on the CD, as analysts clamor for still-lower prices. But as for actual records – the kind made of vinyl – odder and odder innovations flourish. If the CD is dying, the vinyl record is an undead, sexually-alluring vampire. Two recent releases not only treat the record […]

Via comments, here’s a wonderful video by Brazil’s Conrado Almada (both directing and hand-illustrating the work) for the band Skank. (And, indeed, Skank are in fact better known than the likes of OK Go – at least if you’re in Brazil.) It’s in keeping with this week’s (unintentional) stop-action theme, and a reminder of the […]

Kraak & Smaak – Squeeze Me from Kraak & Smaak on Vimeo. Kraak & Smaak are already on my good list. The Dutch duo/DJ team have contributed not only terrific music, but also wonderful videos like the flipbook-animated “Squeeze Me,” seen again above. (It’s one of those videos that can elicit that scream of “Argh, […]

OMT in San Francisco #3: ‘Let it beep’ from One More Thing on Vimeo. The legend of the early sounds of the Mac remains, apparently, an alluring one. Here, Jim Reekes talks to a Dutch documentary crew (though in English) about his thought process in designing sounds for the Mac, including the famous Mac startup […]

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo. “The Sandpit” is a stunning, tilt-shift stop-action reflection of a day in New York City. It warms my heart, especially, as a lot of it is the world steps from where I live and work (which, by virtue of all these tall Manhattan buildings, I can’t actually see […]

A dancer celebrates OpenFrameworks … and we celebrate OpenFrameworks goodness meeting up with FreeFrameGL flexibility. Photo (CC-BY-SA) aniara. The folks at Resolume have given us a fantastic gift: now, you can make your own FreeFrameGL plug-ins with OpenFrameworks. Say wha? Okay, so, first, let’s consider the problem. You want to create a cool visual effect. […]