APPARATI EFFIMERI Tetragram for Enlargement from Apparati Effimeri on Vimeo. Apparati Effimeri write to let us know about their latest visualist projection mapping project, “TETRAGRAM FOR ENLARGEMENT.” Watching abstract patterns wend their way across the geometries of the castle-like building is hypnotic, to be sure. But it’s as the visuals make the building seem to […]

The once and future Walkman. Photo: FaceMePLS. July 1, 1979: it was thirty years ago today that the Sony Walkman went on sale, launching mobile music for the first time. Wait – rewind (so to speak). That honor really belongs to the portable transistor radio – and, indeed, part of the reason America already knew […]

Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer. There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum […]

Reaktor… you know, for kids! Oli, age 7. Photo (CC) Laura Whitehead. Normally, pricing announcements and sales press releases bore me to tears, but this is actually news – Native Instruments is selling Komplete for July only at just US$/EUR 399, instead of $1139/EUR999. That means if you were looking for Reaktor alone – about […]

You’ve seen the demos. You like the idea of tracking tags in the real world to create visuals. And now you want to try augmented reality for yourself – and, incidentally, you’re a Flash developer. Reader Eric Socolofsky writes to share a framework he’s created that makes it much easier to work with the Flash-based, […]

Octopus transmute! I can’t in good conscience fail to mention the JUNO-60 video uploaded to the Roland How Do You Juno contest. The work of UTM, you have love that (a) it’s a video of the legendary JUNO-60, the original, analog JUNO, and (b) all those gorgeous flying imaginary graphics. Clarification: I should say that […]

Getting DIY ads out of YouTube is all the rage these days, but when it comes to certain time-tested synth names, let’s just say the audience is a little different. You love the gear, you make music with the gear, you praise everything that’s brilliant and you’re unafraid of criticizing what’s not. We covered the […]

Claude VonStroke plays Billie Jean, NYC from Dancetracks on Vimeo. Michael Jackson fever may have already put you into overload, but 24-hour news channels aside, there’s still something powerful about the musical legacy people leave and the way it can become a shared experience. It’s something ineffable, well beyond the reach of words – but […]

MSA Remote + VDMX + Ableton Live from Memo Akten on Vimeo. Imagine what’s now possible with a mobile phone: anyone with a supported device can jam with other artists, walk up to an installation, connect to other creators and other software, all using supported protocols. Leaving behind the days of painstaking manual adjustment of […]

Technology still has the power to appear like magic. And one place we may desperately need magic: straightening out our horribly shaky, handheld video shots. Software makers like Apple have already offered up some techniques for doing this – in the case of Apple’s Final Cut Studio, optical flow analysis attempts to track the image […]