A traditional music score can fill reams of paper. But make music generative, and a tiny amount of musical DNA can breed musical events. How little DNA is needed? How about 140 character worth – enough to fit into a single Twitter post? That’s what’s possible in Mixtikl 2, which dubs its Twitter musical “vectors” […]

The Particle v1.0 from Alex Posada on Vimeo. How much sonic and eye-popping goodness can you wrap into a big, light-up sphere? So much goodness. “The Particle” is a kinetic sculpture produced at Barcelona’s visual arts workshop Hangar by software and interactive audiovisual artist Alex Posada. Packed with custom electronics and using XBee for wireless […]

“Decode,” “Digital Design Sesnsations,” opened last night in London at the Victoria & Albert museum in a show running through April. The event was held in collaboration with onedotzero, a digital arts label, presenting organization, and production firm.  Rarely has there been this kind of blow-out explosion of interactive design creativity on this scale. Decode […]

It’s tough not to miss physical objects, but then, some of you have been buying vinyl. Chicago apartment, photo: Katherine Raz. More background. I have actually grown to appreciate year-end reviews. In grade school and high school, I was on different occasions both a yearbook guy and a newspaper guy (when not focusing energies on […]

One beauty of Processing is that it’s so portable, thanks to its intelligent, lightweight engineering, its open source nature, and the fact that it’s built on Java. The elegant text-based language for describing interactive visuals therefore can become a part of a workflow in other places. That, in turn, has led people to look for […]

Deru – Peanut Butter & Patience from Mush Records on Vimeo. 2010 is looking to be a terrific year for handmade computer music from Los Angeles. For one example of why, look to Deru, the composer and live electronic musician. His work continually grows more lush and more organic, drawing from musical strains as diverse […]

Maschine’s lovely hardware controller makes the software drum machine more usable – but the software still behaves like software, and now integrates more fully with your setup in hosts like Live. Photo (CC) Joakim Bergman. Drum machines may have no soul, but thanks to an update, Native’s soft drum machine has a lot more meat. […]

Ólafur Arnalds – Ljósið (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo. Esteban Diácono has produced a delicate, fluid animation in a music video for Ólafur Arnalds’ track Ljósið, on the album “Found Sounds” (Erased Tapes Records; available on vinyl/download).You can also buy the video on iTunes (direct link). The results are mesmerizing, without so […]

Modul8 2.6 feature: Sound Analysis from modul8 on Vimeo. As visualism evolves, part of making tools smarter is making them more musical. So what better way to show off the new 2.6 update to Modul8 than to show visuals popping away to butt-bopping beats by David Last. (I’m entirely addicted to David Last‘s grooves – […]