Yeah, I know, not the same VST. But I know a lot of you feel the VST spirit, so it works. (Just look at your rants on the Propellerhead Record post.) Photo (CC) Phil Baum. The mda-vst collection of effects has been a long-time favorite for me. It’s a set of no-nonsense, unique, simple effects, […]

As inspired by mememamo‘s Visual Space Music, I bought some Ikea Saxan curtains last year for DIY rear-projection experiments. Initially these were used for a series of pixel-cloud shaped screens at the Game On opening night. The Saxan curtains (US$4) were great for this kind of shaped, temporary screen. The white PEVA material is bright […]

Moderat caught my eye tonight, as I rather like their roadcase/sets design: Digging a little deeper though, and I realised that they’re a rather sexy collaboration between Modeselektor and Apparat, with a luscious studio DVD and live visuals produced by Pfanderei. The live show looks lovely, with 3 rear-projected, portrait-oriented screens silhouetting the artists and […]

The translation of music from something largely invisible to a physical object is oddly beautiful, even when imperfect. That’s part of why we’re working on the Tangible Interface Hackday – less than 48 hours away now. Here are a couple of additional sources of inspiration as we prepare. At bottom, Guy John has made a […]

2009 will be remembered as the E3 game event that embraced computer vision. Far from me-too answers to the Wii’s gestural controllers, we saw remarkably different visions of how computer tracking might work. As expected, Sony had their own motion tracking system to unveil at their press conference. But unlike Microsoft’s 3D camera, Sony opted […]

  So, you’ve been looking at that Akai APC40. And it’s appealing. It’s got lots of lights and a huge array of buttons for triggering samples or video or what have you, and plenty of knobs and faders. Now the APC40 has some serious “indie” competition, though, in the form of Livid’s Ohm64. Let’s compare: […]

Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments […]

Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff […]

Indaba Music, a community and suite of online tools for musicians, announced today they’ve revamped their online recording and production tool using Java and JavaFX. The result: a platform-agnostic, online interface that allows you to record music “directly to the Internet.” And the band Weezer is excited enough about it that they’re giving their official […]

With Live 8 in the hands of Ableton fans, two big questions remain for a lot of aficionados: first, how the heck do you deal with this new warp marker interface, and second, how can you make controller mappings for hardware more effective? Thanks to some enterprising, expert users, we’ve got video solutions to each […]