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 […]

One Frame Of Fame shows us how a band can use viral culture and crowdsourcing to grab some publicity and make a couple of thousand people “stars” of a music video. But what could you achieve if you already have a surfeit of fans? For a couple of years, Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch […]

The video for C-Mon & Kypski‘s “More is Less” is currently being created from the tastiest of building blocks. The piece is crowdsourced, designed in a way which is eminently viral, gets fans involved, and yet doesn’t really cost the filmmakers much, beyond the back-end programming required to make it all happen. Of course, the […]