OpenCV in action: Fungi by Todd Vanderlin. (CC) Linux can be an ideal operating system for visualists – with a little attention, anyway. Because it’s a free OS, you have a unique amount of control over hardware, and you can easily deploy your setup to any machine – perfect for last-minute computer changes for gigging, […]

Float away with Mujik… from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo. Musical technology is often designed to be “hard” in character. Interfaces are cold and technological-looking, futuristic like spaceships, or made to replicate antique gear to make guitarists feel nostalgic. Musical interfaces consciously avoid anything “childish” – calling something a “toy” being the worst possible insult […]

The imagination of Carsten Nicolai, aka Alva Noto, is a special place. No matter how minimal, there’s always a subtlety to his beats. No matter how dry, there’s pleasure somewhere in the sounds. A love for technology, mundane and otherwise, is something of a cliche in electronic music, but Nicolai manages to throw himself into […]

In some of the news I’ve missed in the last couple of days are some unusual announcements. Urs Heckmann can be fairly considered one of the great soft synth designers, with accomplishments like Zebra. His latest, Bazille, like many recent soft synths, is a hybrid: FM synthesis plus phase distortion plus the obligatory subtractive synthesis. […]

I’ve been surprised how many augmented reality applications essentially forgo interactivity: that is, they overlay some graphics, but there’s nothing beyond that. As a musician or visualist, of course, you can easily think og so-called augmented reality as a different kind of controller – tracking a marker in space with computer vision and applying graphics […]

Quadruple quadruple your refreshment, quadruple quadruple your enjoyment… sorry, I started quoting old Doublemint Gum jingles. As expected, Dave Smith has released his Tetra (“Tetr4” in the l33t speak on the case). The name says it all: the Tetra takes the popular Mopho synth and packs four of them into a single, compact case. The […]

Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess and noise.io developer Amidio have made a crazy-looking hexagonal sequencer for the iPhone. It comes with plenty of samples and factory sessions if you just want to play around, but I imagine the greatest draw for CDM readers is that it allows exporting your own files via a WiFi server […]

Here’s a switcher story of a different color: from the Mac, to Linux. It’s one thing to talk about operating systems and free software in theory, or to hear from died-in-the-wool advocates of their platform of choice. In this case, we turn to Kim Cascone, an experienced and gifted musician and composer with an impressive […]

Finally, we’ve got a digital instrument you can squeeze. Arrays of buttons may be digital in character, but they’re not a recent invention. Combining the organic, physical gesture with precise control over pitch via some sort of actuator is part of the tradition of musical instrument design. So, strange as it may be, this hybrid […]