Digital technology has transformed the listening experience. But there’s little in the way of physical artifacts of that act, and a diminished sense of humanized relationships to an individual being at the other end. From modern radio to Internet-streamed playlists, our listening world is DJed by automated robots in streams that flow through generic, mass-market […]

GrandVJ, ArKaos’ Mac/Windows, ground-up new software (replacing the legacy ArKaos product) may have had minimalist beginnings. But recent builds have added some really powerful features. Most importantly, there’s more elaborate two-way controller support. There’s a preset for the Akai APC40, but other hardware – like Livid’s Ohm64 and recently-announced Block, the classic monome, and the […]

It may be 2009, but you can still play electronic music as though you’re an invading alien visitor from the future. Just ask The Sonic Manipulator, an electronic musical performer and inventor, alias Claude Woodward. His musical creations range from warped radios to instruments derived from turntable scratches and Theremins. And then there are some […]

The Covert Seq – Creating patterns and Presets from Bjorn Vayner on Vimeo. The Covert Operators and Bjorn Vayner have become my favorite go-to source for wild Ableton Live hacks. And even before the release of Max for Live, Bjorn has built some terrific, simple step-sequencers using Live’s Racks feature. That’s just the Racks feature […]

Want to make a splash among the aficionados of digital sound? Releasing a software instrument emulating a broad collection of vintage digital synthesis chips from game and computer systems seems to do the trick. See my look at that software, and just as importantly, the chips that inspired it. Within days of the release of […]

The buzzword “augmented reality” has come to be applied to everything from simple cubes mapped on markers to compass-driven locative overlays. And if that’s all you ever saw augmented reality do, you’d be forgiven for being… well, bored, frankly. By contrast, here’s a demo that shows some real expressive potential for the medium. A research […]

You don’t actually have to put foliage on your desktop to inspire you to conserve energy, unless it, you know, helps. A lovely Ubuntu screenshot by Akira Ohgaki. A challenge to efficiency brings some terrific results. We’ve got tracks for you to hear, a few quick tips on production with Renoise, a place to go […]

SWEATSHOPPE, The Landing from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo. Imagine painting with projections, without the use of any paint, live and with out post-production. Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy of the new SWEATSHOPPE collective have done that with the use of Jitter and a laptop, transforming ordinary paint rollers into tools for apply real projections like light […]

multi-touch the storm – interactive sound visuals – subcycle labs from christian bannister on Vimeo. What if you could mash, mangle, mush, and morph sounds with your fingers on a screen, watching the waveforms dance in response in three dimensions? That “what if” is expressed beautifully in a project by musician-developer Christian Bannister of Portland, […]

From Sarah and Lara Grant, we have a dress that makes music, with tube-like apparatus made of felt for connecting sound, modular fashion. From the raucous duo Great Tiger, we get a homebrewed arcade controller Ableton Live that mashes loops into dance music with a quick button push. Yep, it’s Handmade Music time again in […]