Image Courtesy of Apple. I’ve already expressed my personal disappointment (though not surprise) with Apple’s direction on the iPad, on Create Digital Music. Having gotten that out of my system, however, you can expect remaining iPad coverage on CDM to stick to the facts – and, as always, to track the way people use technology. […]

Would you use this object if it came with restrictions? Photo — of a hacked Moleskin, ironically — (CC-BY-SA) Alexandre Dulaunoy. Apple’s iPad is here. It starts at $499. It’s a gorgeous, brilliantly-designed device that has the benefits of Apple’s cleverly-engineered, best-in-class developer tools for mobile. A lot are likely to sell. And unfortunately, to […]

History, particularly when coupled with hero worship, can be a creative burden. But sometimes, pioneering work is doubly inspiring not only because of what it meant in its time, but for the possibilities it suggests in our time, for our technologies, for our own modes of personal expression. Marcel Duchamp’s work in kinetic, sculptural optical […]

araabMUZIK Live MPC Set Part 1 from Death by Electric Shock on Vimeo. I have exactly zero interest in entertaining the tired hardware versus software argument that surfaced, inevitably, with the discussion of the upcoming Beat Thang drum machine. But behind that question is a very relevant question: why do people love drum machines? Why […]

Eat your heart out, Ableton/Serato The Bridge. Native Instruments’ Traktor runs four decks at once without breaking a sweat, and there are various ways of incorporating sampling, scratching, and vinyl in a live rig that are pretty easy to set up. But lately we’ve seen some unusual options to build more elaborate setups. Rane even […]

Games as culture, as event, as art with a lowercase ‘a’ – real, active, evolving, sometimes-commercial, sometimes-experimental art – are finally beginning to grab hold. There’s a real scene. It’s a scene that’s interconnected with the ‘visualist’ scene we describe here on CDMotion, somewhere at the nexus of club visuals, gaming, interactive art, and improvising […]

The Machine Orchestra explodes the idea of a laptop orchestra, building a full-blown machine ensemble of the future. We turn to guest writer Jordan, a member of the ensemble, to look behind the scenes in a couple of articles. Rejoin us for part two later this week. -Ed. Welcome to the world of Dr. Ajay […]

Beat Kangz, the upstart drum machine maker out of Nashville, has been cooking up a new device for some time. That creation, the Beat Thang, is finally nearing production. It may not have a nameplate like Akai or Roland, but I can testify that this independently-designed gadget may nonetheless be one to watch. The hardware […]

Behold, the power of GNU! Photo (CC-BY-SA Demet. I love Windows. And by “love,” of course, I mean “tolerate grudgingly.” After all, good as Mac OS X is, running Windows means the ability to get the latest-and-greatest graphics drivers, run-on-anything hardware capabilities, promising new multitouch laptops, terrific gaming, wonderful visual tools like vvvv, quick-and-dirty video […]

Ms. Pinky Revised from Mastah Lee on Vimeo. What should DJing in Ableton Live look like? How could conventional vinyl cueing and scratching be integrated with the Live environment? Serato and Ableton gave us one possible answer to that question last week with The Bridge. Their solution: use your Serato DJ set normally, and simply […]