The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud […]

Ted Pallas sends along this terrific video of a hacked hardware crossfader, created by John Beez, that slides up and down on rails. Slide the crossfader itself vertically, and you change the pitch. It’s always fascinating to see this kind of solution — a bit like the keyboards that added pitch bend by letting you […]

MGFest, the Motion Graphics Festival, continues its multi-city tour March 5-8 (next weekend), on its way to Boston / Cambridge, Massachusetts. The whole conference is just US$7 for all the events. Here’s a quick look at the schedule and highlights: Screenings: if you’re ready to see motion reels on a big screen instead of YouTube, […]

If you’re in the Boston area, I’ll be teaching a one-day workshop on Processing. Think a day-long intensive on learning to program visuals in the free environment. Visual Programming with Processing I’m going to try to get through as much as possible in the early part of the day so I can assist with projects […]

Imagine an alternative universe in which simple digital handheld games evolved into sophisticated music tools. Oh, and they also made lots of really purty lights flash. Mmmmm … flashing lights. Well, that alternative universe seems to be right here. Mike Una gave us a massive dump of unusual new DIY sequencers, crafted from the ground […]

SND @ Club Transmediale 09 from Wuestenarchitekten on Vimeo. You’ve had those moments in which the dock of your Mac popped up or the mouse became visible. None of us enjoys that. But what about when the interface itself – the UI that’s directly related to producing what you’re trying to express — becomes visible? […]

Would You Like to Tap My Box? from kamoni on Vimeo. Drum machine lovers, you now have the beat gear equivalent of Matt Harding and Where the Hell is Matt?. Kamoni, aka sonic creator, composer, and experimenter Micah Frank, takes his favorite devices out on the road, piecing them together into an epic YouTubular jam. […]

I ask you: what is the foundation for rhythmic electronic music? I suggest that the humble step-sequencer is the backbone of many of today’s musical genres and memetic evolutions. To have electronic rhythm, you need to start with a clock and go from there, dividing it into fractions and multiples. Then start assigning sounds to […]

Yum. SuperCollider. Photo: CERN, via Flickr: Image Editor Free and open source software is nothing on its own. Like any technology, it’s the users and the community around it that make it meaningful. Musical practice grows out of culture and community; so does music technology. I’ve heard lots of people buzzing about Expo74, the Max/MSP/Jitter […]

Morgan Packard (music) and Joshue Ott (visuals) at Mutek in 2008. I’m really excited to play with these guys, as I think they have a lot of great ideas about the collaboration between music and visuals. Photo: mutek2007. VJs and visualists are often asked to just make something nice happen behind musicians. What if that […]