The miracle of human hearing goes well beyond audiophile snobbery over “high fidelity,” or the machinations of sometimes-arbitrary, designed-by-committee industry specifications. But, in the context of my rant about perceived myths in audio, what can we hear, really? And how much perceptible sound can you squeeze into an MP3? For his master’s thesis at the […]

Photo (CC) Alosh Bennett. With the regularity of clockwork, stories about how digital audio consumption is degrading the quality of music are published and then re-published. Nearly a decade after the introduction of Apple’s iPod, this still apparently qualifies as news. The content of the articles is so identical, you could believe the bylines are […]

Used as a traditional painting device, the iPhone and iPod touch aren’t terribly impressive, reducing the interaction to a kind of simplistic finger painting. (Ditto any touch device, really.) But attach dynamic, generative brushes to your fingers, and the act of painting digitally is transformed. Behind the scenes, it’s not the software or the technology […]

Whether your trade in audio is in soundtracks for screens and games, or you’re just exploring strange, new worlds and seeking out new life and new timbres in your music, the discipline of sound design is as rich and deep as cooking. It’s something you can do every day. Okay, now just put that “cooking” […]

Wait for it… It’s a sculptural monument to waiting and the wait cursor, controlled by an iPad. This doesn’t count as the first iPad-controlled art, as I was part of a show last month on that theme; documentation of that soon. But is a fascinating homage to an iconic image of our age, and time […]

Fruity loops. Photograph (CC-BY) Sherman Tan. Like well-stocked studios of hardware, software has become personal, idiosyncratic, and stuffed with functionality. Computer producers are passionate as always about what works. And that has made FL Studio a kind of subculture all its own. Image-Line has a unique way of encouraging loyalty: while the company still peddles […]

NOVAK 3D DISCO™ EVENT SAMPLER from Novak Collective on Vimeo. It appears Novak have hit on a winning formula for making live audiovisuals more complete and more immersive. The 3D glasses are just one part of that; they’re adding dimension to their parties in more ways than one. Toby Harris sends along this reel of […]

Google’s Android has been a relatively slow starter for mobile music software, but a gem like Adam Smith’s free Ethereal Dialpad proves it’s a viable option, and the app is an inspiring musical toy, to boot. Perhaps more important than that, behind the scenes, Adam is employing a really beautifully audio engine of his own […]

Kaleido Demo from Agnes Chang on Vimeo. Part of the beauty of working with code is that it can refine the way you think, challenging you to make design ideas into systems. But what’s often a challenge for beginners – heck, sometimes even for experienced coders – is thinking through the ways in which component […]

The limited edition version of the album is actually an object you might care about. So, yes, as the digital album evolves from strange plastic jewel cases into ephemeral download form, it’s evolving the other way, too. If anyone had listened to the predictions, albums would be irrelevant by now. Instead, finding a way to […]