There’s a curious distinction in hardware keyboards. You’ll find plenty of keyboards geared for performance with software at the low-end to mid-range. But if you want a keyboard with uncompromising durability and action – and you’re willing to pay more and lift more weight – those choices suddenly disappear. Suddenly, you have to buy a […]

jumping beans & .tape. from la bisogno on Vimeo. What might a jar full of Mexican jumping beans sound like if composing their own ambient music? Scott Worley points us to a musical experiment by his labelmate Daniel Romero aka .tape, on netlabel yo.yo.pang!. .tape programmed a sound environment in the free multimedia patching environment […]

We’ve been keeping an eye on Seam Carving (or “Content Aware Image Resizing”, for the academically unhip) since 2007. Now, via French VJ blog extraordinaire LeCollagiste, we discover that Photoshop CS5 will feature what Adobe and Princeton are now calling PatchMatch. PatchMatch: Structural Image Editing from Dan Goldman on Vimeo. No sign of any publicly […]

You’ll want superb music on loop, because it may … take some time to get out of this puzzle. Musicians and artists now have the power to fuse visuals, sound, and interaction, to make a spectacle, an album, and a game all at once. But with the blank canvas of three different media before you, […]

Nosaj Thing Visual Show Compilation Test Shoot from Adam Guzman on Vimeo. Designing visualist work is often a baroque process of iterating through more and more layers, ornaments, and complexity. But it’s stunning, sometimes, how people respond to simple, elegant ideas. Adam Guzman‘s collaboration with Taiwanese-born, LA-based designer Julia Tsao yields this beautiful sequence of […]

The tracker is back. Piano rolls and fake multitrack tape turn out not to be the only way to conceptualize how music is put together in digital form. And Renoise is a terrific way to learn a ground-up approach to production, because you get the quick workflow of the tracker without having to sacrifice so […]

Alongside our Renoise + Indamixx netbook-optimized production competition, I’m kicking off this week a series of CDM and guest tutorials on working with Linux audio tools, Renoise, and more. First up, here’s a basic look at how to route the free-as-in-beer linuxDSP effects toolkit into the powerful, modern, open-source DAW Ardour. Correction: I implied that […]

Speaking of Processing, Rhizome at The New Museum (based here in New York) has an interview with Casey Reas and Ben Fry, the creators of Processing, authored by Dan Shiffman, my dissertation mentor and a major contributor himself to the community. My favorite answer comes from Casey Reas. It’s fashionable to talk about how constrains […]

I want to highlight a comment from a recent story in which I was reflecting on how to approach Processing, and – in a larger sphere – design simplicity. Tom writes: My opinion – the problem with Processing is that is not part of a software ecosystem. Flash is aligned with Illustrator and After Effects […]

At work in Renoise. Photo (CC) Federico Reiven [blog]. If you’re ready to show your skills creating digital music, we want your work. UPDATED! New contest entry page, new deadline (10/25): http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/ Plus tips, tracks, and more to give you additional inspiration: More with Less:”Efficient” Renoise Music Tracks and Tips Renoise, the "bottom-up" music production […]