Android Music: Electrum Drum Machine-Sampler, Reloop Sequencer

Google’s Android platform has gotten only a fraction of the attention for music making that iPhone OS and iPad have, but that doesn’t mean the OS doesn’t have some advantages of its own. Thanks to being an open OS, it’s also easier to install custom OSes, and repurpose older devices and build cheap embedded computers […]

More Browser Notation: Type Notes Quickly, Store Scores Online

Music scores remain one of the best ways to record or share many musical ideas. If you’ve done even casual notation, you’ve likely had the experience of scrawling something down on a scrap piece of paper, manuscript or otherwise. Imagine, instead, quickly scrawling something in the now-ubiquitous web browser window. Gregory Dyke writes with a […]

Devices and Expression: Curation, Design, Immersion, and Freedom

iPad meets Mac, new generation meets, old – what next? Photo (CC) Hassan Hodges. Steve Jobs is threatening to destroy the Internet. And it’s not even his fault. No, I’m not talking about whether or not the iPad supports Flash. I’m talking about the new propensity of various analysts to redefine computing, technology, and apparently […]

Roger Linn Imagines a New, Multi-touch Instrument, And — HELP!

We’ve lived so long with a musical world dominated by the piano keyboard that it can be hard to look beyond it. But for some time, musicians have desired a set of common requirements for what might replace it: The ability to hit specific pitches in a convenient layout, perhaps one more convenient than the […]

Visual Control Done Right: Ohm64 Automaps to GrandVJ

Arkaos Grand VJ Ohm64 Template from Livid Instruments on Vimeo. What’s your favorite controller of choice for live visuals? Jay Smith from Livid points us to this lovely use of their Ohm64 controller, right out of the box with ArKaos’ GrandVJ audiovisual software for Mac and Windows. It’d be great to see some of this […]

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas in the Browser; Standard Formats for Scores

The march of “because you can” experiments with the new generation of Web browsers continues. Last week, we saw real-time synthesis in the browser from a team at Mozilla. Next up: music notation. Mohit Muthanna has executed a gorgeous example of musical notation using HTML5’s Canvas. (The Canvas is a new feature of the Web […]

Musical Instrument Loss and Recovery After the Nashville Flood

Photo courtesy Guitar Center. They describe the scene: “A shattered Kay acoustic guitar (Circa late 1950’s or early 1960’s) sits on the floor of Soundcheck Nashville, waiting to be assessed for damage.” Wherever they occur in the world, disasters’ material impact can be nearly as emotionally and personally challenging as loss of life. Floods in […]

Octane Render Shows Awesome Power of GPU Rendering

Just how awesome is the GPU? So awesome. (That’s how we put it in highly technical jargon, anyway.) You’d be forgiven for being skeptical of what photorealistic rendering’s future might be. After all, we’ve been hearing about how raytracing and better-looking, more realistic renders would someday revolutionize 3D visuals, and that, thanks to the GPU, […]

GrainCube: Free Granular Instrument for Reaktor, Lemur

The sounds are alien and twisted. The user interface looks like engineers from Boeing and the Klingon homeworld got together to collaborate on a new spaceship cockpit. It can only mean one thing: GrainCube is here. Built on sound designs and conception by sonic renegades Richard Devine and Josh Kay (Devinesound), with development by Rick […]