plugdata, the visual programming environment for sound and media based on Pure Data (Pd), is becoming its own scene. It’s a great place to start patching your own sonic experiments, and if you haven’t already done that, you should. But it’s also becoming a treasure trove of free and paid tools and toys for musicians even if you never touch the wires inside. v.0.9.2 makes that better for developers and users alike. And did I mention it’s free, on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS/iPad?

Sequential’s new Fourm is a 4-voice polysynth with an all-analog signal path and polyphonic aftertouch and a price under a grand. To pull it off, Sequential designed an all-new expressive keybed and adapted their signature analog circuitry from the Prophet-5 (and Prophet-10). I spoke to Sequential about their instrument and the engineering that made it all happen.

Forget what you know about drum machines. You’re about to open up a browser tab and listen to a drum machine made with a bouncing DVD logo, or a game of Minesweeper, or seismic data, De Bruijn sequences, or pics of cats and boots. Okay, it’s fairly short of 10k — they’re at 48 so far — but if this is your first time, you’d better plan on not getting any more work done today anyway.

The history of computation is connected to textiles. And in everything from choreographic gestures to weaving, one event makes patterns sing in music and materials and bodies. Across Sheffield, Berlin, Barcelona, Linz, and online, the latest Alpaca Conference is entering its second weekend, following an in-person festival the first weekend.

Its size is epic, as if a sci-fi prop itself. Its otherworldly sound is chilling in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And The Blaster Beam is the unique handiwork of Captain Kirk’s own nephew — okay, Craig Huxley, who played that character on the original series. Meet The Blaster Beam. If any of us wins the lottery, there will be signs.

It might trigger a flood of grade school memories or open a world of computing you never got to experience. But either way, “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground),” a music video coded in Applesoft BASIC, is itself “vintage” now. At 20 years old, it’s a window into a time when open-sourcing a music video was the thing to do.

There’s no grid, no harsh colors. Tinge swells and sways like a windchime, coming to life in spinning color wheels. It’s probably nothing like any arpeggiator you’ve seen before — or maybe it’s a “note agitator.” Co-creators Daedelus (Alfred Darlington) and Takuma Matsui (Rainbow Circuit) take us inside the process of how they created and thought about this new generative, responsive, playable melodic delight.

You may think you know the Yamaha DX7 from those couple of presets that dominated the 80s. But Oliver Greschke’s Elastic OSC for iPhone and iPad is a reminder of just how much potential Yamaha’s breakthrough FM synth can offer. And now Elastic OSC app can easily import those sounds, with a bunch of unique presets to get you started — plus a link to a cool generative tool that works with anything.

It’s a multisampler. It’s got 16 tracks. It’s an effects box. It’s got elaborate routing and multiple machines. It’s a modulation monster. Or to look at it another way, The Bride of Octatrack beast is here. Here it is at a glance.

Quick access to mutes is a must-have in any live performance context. Elektron owners have enjoyed that on the Analog Rytm; now it’s Push’s turn.