Bottle wall (no sound) from Alex Beim on Vimeo. Organic LEDs? Interactive visual fabrics? Bah. The future is BOTTLES, man. Alex Beim sends along this lovely-looking display made from bottles illuminated by LED lights, which makes for the Official CDM Saturday Diversion Post. (Um… yeah, the first and last of those.) The real lesson: if […]

Automap on other devices – and an iPhone as a remote control for your Live set? Our friend Ben Rogerson at MusicRadar have caught up with the chaps at Novation at a London trade show to have a look at Automap for iPhone. This app hasn’t yet hit the App Store yet – Hispasonic and […]

No, you’re not imagining things. That is in fact 4096-pixel-wide footage you’re editing, right in Sony Vegas. What happens when digital cinematography meets a favorite desktop video editing app for mortals? When our friend Nathanaël Lécaudé, also a talented multitouch developer, said he had encountered some work with RED, I was really curious to know […]

Greensboro, NC-based art music band Invisible are indiscriminate about technology – in a good way. Plastic cups, keyboards, typewriters, machines controlled by robotics, if it’s in the trash or at a thrift store, it has a place in the band. Sequences are executed in physical, radial player instruments, without a controlling computer anywhere in site. […]

Digital technology has the power to transmit information more efficiently, to make the invisible visible, and to express new things. It can also be pushed so far to the limits of actually transmitting information to be meaningless. It can push well beyond what we can even perceive in a useful way. What’s bizarre and wonderful […]

If you’re using Ableton Live 8, you’ve hopefully already discovered the joys of Track Groups. Track grouping is a welcome feature in any DAW, but in Live, the mixer-centric Session View can easily get unruly with endless columns of vertical tracks. I wanted to share some discoveries about Track Groups, including what I thought was […]

CTRL ALT SHIFT – from V.I. Artists on Vimeo. Michael Faulkner of D-FUSE says the most interesting thing in this video: it’s when technology becomes redundant that it’s accepted as art. Photography gets invented, and suddenly painting – a business and a craft for centuries – is “high art.” (Don’t ask, incidentally, about what late […]

Want to reignite interest in DJs who actually use their hands and fingers to slice up and juggle sounds? A cavalcade of “laptopists” is the ticket. Suddenly, at least in some corners, people are again interested in turntablism. It’s nice to see how a controller can integrate digital loop and cue points with a setup […]

Working with sound is, for many of us, the experience that attracted us to working with computers. Field recordings can be the best way to get close to sound – you’re attached to sounds you’ve found in the real world, you’ve experienced and collected, even if you transform them into something very different in production. […]

Speaking of games, you can expect game production to start to attract the attention of musicians and web publishers. Whereas a few short years ago, targeting musicians might mean dangling rock club gigs or album sales, now a lot of those same music makers want to break into gaming, too. Kongregate is a bit like […]