The iPhone’s glass touchscreen may be a thing of beauty, but despite its multi-touch capabilities, it would seem this device is incapable of responding to how hard you tap it. But the developers at Wave Machines Labs apparently didn’t want to take no for an answer. The iGOG drum suite for iPhone provides drum pads […]

Today was full of good news for people interested in carrying pads in the palm of their hand. Fans of the Nintendo DS in North America, the Korg DS-10 Plus synthesizer for Big N’s game system is now coming to your side of the Pacific Ocean. (That also bodes well, I think, for other parts […]

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 […]