Loops have gotten an unfortunate reputation as being a stand-in for real musicians or real musicianship – perhaps because, too often, they are. That’s why it’s always refreshing to see a discussion of how looping can incorporate musical technique. Like many electronic musicians, I have zero background in drumming; I’m a keyboardist and was trained […]

AudioMulch isn’t just a sequel or a new episode. This is AudioMulch: The Next Generation. We have holodecks in this one. That’s the claim of the developer, anyway, and looking at the features, I have to agree. AudioMulch has long been a cult favorite for people wanting to patch together unusual sonic tools and performance […]

The fantastic brightness of LED screens makes them one of the pinnacles of display technology for large events and installations. However their relative expense and size makes them inaccessible for smaller venues or budgets. Enter Evil Mad Scientist’s Peggy LED board. The Peggy 2.0 board allows the 25×25 LED to be addressed individually, and Jay […]

I may have to eat my words — here’s something I didn’t imagine being possible any time soon. It’s extremely processor-intensive computer vision, happening in a video stream, all with JavaScript worker threads. That is, this is possible because the next version of Firefox, version 3.1, allows for multiple threads processing the video instead of […]

Maybe it was aesthetically incompatible with ugly PCs. Apogee Electronics has just announced they’ve dropped support development for Windows. Now, that’s their prerogative – not least because customers who prefer using Windows can simply choose to buy their competitors’ products. But in a press release entitled “Apogee Discontinues Windows Support,” “Apogee Discontinues Windows Development,” Apogee […]

The Cupertino-Mushroom Kingdom gap has been closed: you can now mix and match DS and iPhone/iPod touch for wireless control of music and visuals. DSMI, the homebrew library that has enabled wireless and serial MIDI connections from the Nintendo DS, has come to iPod touch and iPhone. That means anyone building instruments and controllers on […]

For further proof that you can make footage in Blender, here’s an example whipped up by Troy James Sobotka. Troy’s approach is one familiar to a lot of us: grab the simplest camera possible, go shoot something, go make something. I think it’s part of what I find appealing about the world of live visualists […]

Life is short. You find yourself having to absorb the work techniques of a lot of different software. And some of those divisions — between vector and pixels, 3D and 2D, motion and stills — look increasingly old-fashioned. Since the early 90s, we’ve seen a succession of software try to bridge those gaps. But for […]

Very often, computers and music gear greedily consume whole corners of the room. Here’s a tidy alternative, modest in space consumption as well as in cost. So, what’s so wonderful about DIY creations by our friend Sasa Djuric (aka fibra)? It isn’t just that his stands are recycled from monitor stand parts. It’s not just […]

People seem generally glum/cranky today for some reason, so I offer this (non-digital music) image: a Carnaval parade of guys in wooden, mustachioed masks ringing cowbells. More cowbell, indeed. Wearing wooden masks and cow bells strapped around their waists, Germans defied the freezing temperatures to participate in the traditional cow bell-ringing procession in Mittenwald, in […]