NAMM, the trade group that includes music manufacturers and vendors, holds its flagship conference every January in Anaheim, California. It’s the biggest music trade show in the world, and even the biggest trade show of the year in Anaheim, home to Disneyland. But, of course, we’re about more than just pre-packaged industry news. So, we’ll […]

Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) represents the end of a long-running transition of the Mac operating system from 32-bit to 64-bit support. 64-bit computing offers marginal (but measurable) performance improvements, and more importantly the ability to address more RAM — a lot more RAM, currently more than is even physically available in any shipping […]

Renoise + Linux is a delicious combination. Ah, there’s nothing like bleeding-edge laptop performance. And to really convey to your audience that you’re indeed playing live, there’s nothing like glitches, dropouts, and crashing in the middle of a live set. It brings that homespun, digital authenticity to your performance, as you… Okay, who am I […]

Photo courtesy Droid Behavior from a previous year. In Anaheim this week, the music manufacturer trade gather to show their wares. But 8pm – 4am Friday night, we party. “Wham Bam Thank You NAMM” has become an annual tradition, an unofficial afterparty of sorts for the first two days of the trade show. This year’s […]

With all the excitement brewing over multi-touch and tablet PCs, it’s great to see a simple, beautiful installation, augmenting paper books with subtle fiducials, letting the book control the technology: ImaginArt from recreat on Vimeo. Built with Max/MSP/Jitter by recreat. Lovely.

A 25-key MIDI keyboard? Really? You’re telling me you did that before making a nice Accordion Dock? Missed opportunity, if you ask me. Apple added the ability to connect custom hardware to its iPhone and iPod touch platform last year, so it was only a matter of time before someone made a music hardware interface. […]

Legendary artist Pat Metheny has gone to robotics for his next album, and you can finally see a first glimpse at what the results look like. The Orchestrion is a project by the musical robotic specialists LEMUR (League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots). That’s all I’ll say for now, but I definitely will be working […]

Could your next music controller be a tablet or slate? Dell’s “concept” points the way to what that might look like, but the wait continues for more shipping products. Photo: Dell. For all the focus on clever little music apps on your phone, it’s the slate/tablet form factor that seems to hold the greatest promise […]

night lights from thesystemis on Vimeo. Who says “art” can’t also involve the words “fun” and “play”? We’ve been watching a lot of outdoor projection, projection mapping, and visuals on architecture. The twist in “Night Lights” is that onlookers are active participants, making the side of a building into an interactive visual playground. The best […]

Hexagons are the new squares. After years of square grids, music is discovering the hexagon in a big way. Hexagonal lattices have advantages of their own, in terms of how efficiently they pack space and the way adjacent sides align. Don’t believe your local mathematician? Ask your local bee. What’s interesting is that, as musicians […]