Performers don’t get paid for radio play, even if writers do. Billy Corgan – yes, the Smashing Pumpkins Billy Corgan – is getting in on the issue, testifying to Congress. So should you be on Billy’s side, or the broadcasters? That’s a trickier question. Photo (CC) Andra Veraart. Policy, intellectual property, and changing business models […]

Your feet are your two most valuable, underused extremities for music. Your hands are busy, but your feet can trigger transport, recording, looping, different instruments … you get the idea. All you need is a perfect controller. AlexMC on the Ableton forum liked our $10 DIY footcontroller for Ableton Live, as engineered by Mike Una. […]

Musician Christopher Willits has an ongoing series for XLR8R Magazine in which he talks his own technical workflow. In the latest episode, he adds live visuals to his Ableton Live set using Max/MSP/Jitter. What’s nice about this is you see how some clever mapping can make visuals integrate neatly with music. I’m somewhat insane, so […]

Dreaming of a future in which music, instead of just being rendered audio files, arrives in fully generative, interactive form? Albums might “listen” to the world around you, and listeners could record their own alternate versions of music and share with others. RjDj, the generative mobile music platform for Apple devices, realizes that future right […]

As an addendum to the last story, Ivica Ico Bukvic sends along an example of the [myu] Max/MSP + Unity game engine combination in action. Here’s the surprise: Unity isn’t generating visuals. Instead, Unity simulates ripples created by movement in the space, and builds physical models that are sonified and spatialized by Max/MSP. Speaking of […]

Take a powerful game engine (for animation, 2D and 3D graphics, physics, and on-screen interaction). Add the flexibility of a visual development environment for programming with virtual patch cords, for rich sonic and musical capabilities plus easy interaction with data and input. That’s the idea of combining something like Unity 3D with Max/MSP. In the […]

Jitter works brilliantly when it comes to processing signal – and that means for signal-like work with video and textures, it’s fantastic, as well as the usual Max-y tasks like processing input from physical sensors and input devices and the like. But try to do a whole lot of sophisticated 3D work, and Jitter may […]

Sequencers by definition traditionally lock musical patterns into repetitive, unchanging blocks of time. But a new generation of generative sequencers can instead form organic patterns that change and transform. Nodal is a totally free-as-in-beer (closed-source) sequencer for composing music. (A license is needed for commercial use.) As the name implies, it uses a matrix of […]

Your GPU thanks you for playing this game back in the day. In case Quake creator John Carmack wasn’t already your hero, here’s a nice move: when EA wouldn’t green-light an iPhone version of the classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D, Carnack had an answer: fine, just let me do it myself. In an astonishingly open […]