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 […]

Rapid Projection Mapping System from Kyle McLean on Vimeo. Kyle McLean is quick. He’s apparently quick at connecting together visual wonders in the multimedia patching environment vvvv, and he’s now focused on an environment that allows augmented projection to be “sketched” quickly onto surfaces. That speed doesn’t mean laziness, though: it means the ability to […]

Photo (CC-BY-SA) Brandon Daniel. Open source hardware may not sound like something that would produce a huge musical hit – unless you’ve met the x0xb0x. A clone of Roland’s legendary TB-303 bassline generator, the open version offered not only greater afford-ability than the now-rare antique, but expanded possibilities for hacking the hardware into a musical […]

With May fast approaching, garage sale season is kicking off in the US. For the DIY crowd, that means a lot of digging through piles of obsolete technology in the hopes of finding something useable, then bargaining with the seller to pay as little for it as possible. This year, you can add 3.5″ floppy […]

Maschine’s hardware controller, which assigns dedicated physical control to the software’s functions. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Dmitriy G./droptune. “Feature creep” is a tricky thing. We all say we want tools that focus more on what we want rather than just add features. But some functionality is there for a reason. When Maschine came out, Native Instruments’ take […]

Ask a machine to emulate human creativity, and at the very least, you’re guaranteed to learn something. Modeling creative rules and intuitive algorithms as generative code is itself an eminently human activity – think of it as interactive theory. And where the computer fails to sound like a human, you learn something, too. Improv-Visor is […]