You’ve seen the splashy “sound just like –” headlines in various music magazines. But imitation is, after all, an essential form of musical development. Something magical happens as you try to imitate something – you begin to hear it differently. Sometimes you wind up nailing something exactly, and in the process discover how you might […]

No Carrier (a.k.a. Don Miller) has released glitchNES, a ROM (read: game cartridge) that makes user-controlled visuals on the old school Nintendo Entertainment System, with results that resemble the effects of circuit-bending. glitchNES is free, open source, and runs well on NES hardware and in accurate emulators, e.g., Nestopia. Get it from No-Carrier.com. As Don […]

It’s a tough time for the music tech industry like so many industries. But there are beautiful products coming from independent developers – indie, boutique shops crafting musical instruments in code. The folks at Devine Machine, makers of the likes of Guru and Lucifer, unloaded three big announcements overnight – enough to make you think […]

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is a cash prize contest for new musical instruments held this month at Georgia Tech, judged by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk, Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy, and Georgia Tech’s Parag Chordia. There are some familiar faces in there, but some fascinating, new ideas, too, like a motorcycle engine you can play […]

Touch interfaces abound on this site, but Usine has one edge: it’s built right out of the box to enable touch interfaces with custom, modular creation of whatever you might like. And there’s now an Ableton Live template in testing, with a lovely 5×5 controller. The advantage of working this way, as I see it, […]

vellum | slices of a virtual sculpture | seoul | 2009 from 2minds on Vimeo. Our Modernist and Post-Modernist towers of capital are familiar sights. I live here in the shadow of the Chase Manhattan Building and across the street from an IM Pei block. But the magical thing about projection is the way in […]

An unfortunately-worded tip jar at the Hanoi Airport. Photo: theloneconspirator. Here’s a different take on soundware business models: offer your stuff for free, then depend on donations. That’s the tack at Togeo Studios, who have an impressive collection of packs. Wave Attack I, for instance, includes single-cycle waveforms with arpeggiated sequences and leads. Their work […]

Depeche Mode’s latest album, “Sounds of the Universe,” is due April 20 internationally. I got the chance to cover the band for Keyboard Magazine, speaking with Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher as well as returning producer Ben Hillier, who was a big part of the signature sound of 2005’s “Playing the Angel.” Martin developed eBay […]

c Ever feel like you’ve found the seam dividing past and future? The past: restrictive UI frameworks requiring pages and pages of code to produce dated-look 2D displays. Proprietary software with rigid interfaces. Input bottlenecked through the x and y coordinates of a single mouse pointer. The future: UIs whipped together graphically or with a […]

Photo: Orin Zebest. Are you sick of the death of dynamic range? Are you mad as hell at squashed audio that means to be “loud” and only wind up with the actual sounds smooshed out? Alternatively, are you guilty of some detail-squishing dynamic abuse yourself? A campaign is on to get the dynamic war out […]