Interested in experimenting with MIDI, minus the wires? Why not try a DIY hack yourself? Limor Fried aka Lady Ada of Adafruit Industries has posted a detailed tutorial on transmitting MIDI over the inexpensive and relatively friendly XBee wireless module. It’s a bit of a hack – you force the XBee to communicate at MIDI […]

Superfluid vs Particle from jimi hertz on Vimeo. Speaking of insanely-cool multi-touch magic and the wonderful resource that is the NUI Group, CDMo Fave Memo is working with Jim Hertz to do ridiculous things with water screens (water as in H2O) and particles (the virtual kind). I could explain, but watching says it all. Or, […]

CASTALIAN / New concept Audio Visual Touch Sequencer from nucode on Vimeo. We’ve talked in the past about the idea of user interfaces and visual output merging. Instead of a UI on one screen and visuals on another, the idea is that the interface itself melds into the output. I can think of few better […]

The iPhone and iPod touch are getting more in the way of playable software instruments that could ease its transformation into a handheld idea-capturing gadget. noise.io lays claim to being the first full-featured soft synth on the platform, with unusual FM synthesis control – and I still like the fact that it isn’t anything like […]

In the thrilling conclusion of our chat with Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, Matt Ganucheau and I explore deep thoughts about the roles of interactivity and adaptivity in music and game design — then attempt to dance in giants Katamari Damacy hats. (Note the use of the word attempt — those things were more than a […]

Wonderful things happen when you invite lovers of noise together in a room. Musicians and non-musicians, electronics geeks and first-timers, folks pick up a soldering iron — often for the first time — and cause utter mayhem. So we again had a fantastic time at Handmade Music last month. I’ve just gotten the photos in, […]

Matt Ganucheau and I got to sit down with Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing Video during the Game Developer Conference to discuss some of the potential for interactive music in games. Matt is a composer, sound designer, and educator, talking about how he’s encouraging his own students to think about adaptive music in new ways, […]

  Hot-boiled waterphone, coming up. Troels explains: “We boiled it at 4 different temperature levels and its a part of the massively multi-sampled waterphone (it’s over 2.900 samples).” Award-winning composer Troels Folmann has made a name as a video game composer on the likes of the Tomb Raider series, as well as espousing new ideas […]

li {margin-bottom:10px;} Packing up VJ Gear to fit on an airplane can be tricky business. I flew from Portland to San Diego in order to join the Xochi Media crew for Coachella this year – luckily, they’re supplying most of the heavy equipment, so I needed only the essentials, as photographed above. Here’s what I […]

Product Placement from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo. It’s like Creature Comforts for the ad industry. But look out, traditional animators – still images can come to live almost magically through the interactive powers of Animata, an open source animation tool. In a brilliant series of animated interviews, Product Placement populates its scenes with classic ad […]