Stock footage has long been a VJ cliché, and remixes in and of themselves aren’t always meaningful. But in the right hands – just as in audio sampling – sampled content can take on new life. It might even find an unrecognizable form. And with publicly-funded documentaries, why not give the actual content back to […]

The Akai APC40, the result of a collaboration between Akai and Ableton, has made its way into the wild. Here’s the first hands-on video – I have to say, I love the green lights. Who would have thought that Matrixsynth green would be the shade this year? You can thank AudioMIDI.com for getting the loaner […]

Reware your PDA from Hans-Christoph Steiner on Vimeo. Give a hoot – don’t pollute with your old mobile gear. Make musical creations with it instead, powered by Linux. Sure, there are wonderful things happening with mobile music applications on platforms like the shiny, new iPhone. But remember how technology was supposed to democratize access? Lots […]

Propellerhead’s upcoming Record has attracted a lot of attention and discussion, but some of the forum chatter has centered on the new authorization scheme. Record will in fact use a hardware dongle as a key. Propellerhead obviously anticipated a response, as on their own site, they concede: “Wait – a USB device? You mean… a […]

Interface 27 from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo. There has been a long tradition in live visuals and motion graphics, inherited from many other media, of maintaining a “secret sauce,” or the guarded formula of eleven herbs and spices. Ironically, for all you hear today “DIY” and “open source” in the same sentence, a lot of the […]

Interface 27 from CyberPatrolUnit on Vimeo. There has been a long tradition in live visuals and motion graphics, inherited from many other media, of maintaining a “secret sauce,” or the guarded formula of eleven herbs and spices. Ironically, for all you hear today “DIY” and “open source” in the same sentence, a lot of the […]

Arduino the Cat, Breadboard the Mouse and Cutter the Elephant from hmt on Vimeo. Media artists and design houses around the world: you’ve got nothing on this group of eight to eleven-year old English girls, bravely exploring interaction design, soft toy hacks, and physical computing using the open source Arduino platform to animate cats, mice, […]

Photo (CC) Brian Gurrola …and yes, we expect the bit on the right to come into greater focus soon. The name gives it away: Record is a product based on a feature Reason users have long requested — audio recording. The surprise is, that need has led to an entirely new tool. Instead of just […]

It’s easy – and partly appropriate – to appreciate the bleeps and blips of homemade and bent circuits as noise-making insanity. But as Peter Edwards (casperelectronics) and E-Squared walked us through their creations at the April installment of Handmade Music, it was clear that compositional exploration was at the heart of the work. Edwards talked […]