Having full control of a complete mix and session from your MIDI keyboard – without having to move your hands to the mouse or shift your focus to your computer screen – can be an addictive, if elusive feeling. Here’s a look at one way to accomplish that objective using the new Axiom Pro keyboards […]

dromama from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo. Turning one knob and bouncing up and down may work for some, but virtuoso electronic performers want more live control out of music. Why? Because we have more fun. Raymond Weitekamp is a monome power user based at Princeton who has organized like-minded monomists. As with Edison’s performance work […]

Ready to evolve past the mouse and keyboard? Squidy helps bind together all the possible “natural” user interfaces by putting touch, ink, speech, and vision and tracking together in a powerful set of libraries. In other words, if you’ve got a novel interface, Squidy will help you not only make sense of it, but use […]

edison…. new set up….! from edison on Vimeo. The open source monome, ingeniously minimal as it is, is just an object. It’s the community that has formed around this hardware controller, a simple array of light-up buttons, that has made monome a cultural phenomenon, by pushing performance practice. Using grids of simple music events, they […]

Matrox MXO2-Mini review for VJs. Uncompressed HD mixing laptop to laptop. from vade on Vimeo. Enough of low-resolution hardware mixing. Our friend Anton aka vade has dreamed for some time of doing full, uncompressed HD mixing of two laptops. And he means laptops — not luggable towers or anything like that. It’s a common enough […]

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 […]