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 […]

Mixed Up – Beat Blender and Mixmaster 1200 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo. Matti Niinimäki is back DJing with flea market, broken appliances as physical interfaces – and the whole project is getting better and better. We saw an early prototype of the Beat Blender, a re-purposed Osterizer with fake fuzzy fruit that stand in […]

The Arduino isn’t quite an deal choice for a live generative visual computer – but it can do some gorgeous things with signals. Sebastian Tomczak has a gorgeous hack (as seen via Limor Fried) that manipulates RGB data lines with the Arduino. You connect horizontal and vertical sync signals, then go to town. The Arduino […]

Experimenting in the projection lab; photo: hc gilje. videoprojectiontools, the powerful and intuitive Max/MSP/Jitter-developed Mac and Windows tools for projection mapping, just got a nice update. The new version has OpenSoundControl (OSC) support – and yes, despite the “Sound” in the acronym, it’s really more like Open … Control. Max is not required to use […]

Closing out our (unexpected) Week of Optical Flow feature, Michel from the vvvv forums has ported Andrew Benson’s optical flow implementation to that DirectX-based, Windows-only, free for non-commercial-use patching environment. (Jitter and Quartz Composer, mentioned earlier, each use OpenGL, not DirectX.) Since it is DirectX, the shader uses HLSL instead of GLSL. In technical terms, […]

For lovers of the simplicity and fun of the Casio VL series, a successor seems is finally here. The Operator-1 (OP-1), even in prototype form, has us hot and bothered more than anything we’ve seen recently. We’ve been able to snag some additional details. MusicRadar got a video with the creators, though you won’t learn […]

Scenes from the Live 8 launch event in Berlin other Live 8. Actually, Live 8 will totally make you feel like eight men. Ableton, you can quote me on that on your press clippings page if you like. (Pictured: Live 8, the relief event, no relation to Live 8, the software.) Live 8 is now […]