Electronics and synths are hard and you can’t hug them; plush animals and toys and blankets and pillows are soft and huggable. And we won’t even get started on the slightly-absurd gender associations of soft textiles and hard, toxic electronics. Or at least, so goes the traditional assumption. But increasingly, designers are becoming interested in […]

Electronics and code and whatnot are great fun, but a lot of people want to know, how can they add actual, physical motion to a project? I’ve rounded up the last few odds and ends from the London Music Hackday organized in the offices of The Guardian, and came across Alistair MacDonald and Mr. Duck’s […]

The Music Bore – Video 2 from Nicholas Humfrey on Vimeo. “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t allow you to listen to Coldplay.” What would radio be like if playlists were not only robotic, but had robot DJs pulling information from the Interwebs dynamically? That’s the question asked by the winning team at London’s Music Hackday […]

Photo (CC) Clonny. Details on Flickr. With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are […]

In that summer movie mood? Jeremy Rotsztain has been working on a new series of digital art that derives Jackson Pollock-style action paintings from Hollywood action movies. Software processes the video of explosions and other action sequences from classic movies and “paints” them into abstract art, leaving a trace of the action as splattered color […]

KILL THE FIGHTER! What would a slick motion opening look like for, um, classic Starcraft gaming televised? (Oh, yes – Korea really is that cool.) While we’re generally not that interested in motion reels, these videos are made of awesome, and seem to be a special case. It’s like Monday Night Football for us Americans. […]

WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo. As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback. Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument: 1. The Walkman has […]

Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder. What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words: “It makes noise … a lot of noise.”

If you work with video at all, you’re likely already best friends with VideoLAN’s VLC Media Player, the lightweight, fool-proof Mac/Windows/Linux player that somehow manages to play any video file on any OS without intervention. So, it was big news last week as VLC hit the 1.0 milestone, a major, polished, stable release of this […]

The Linn 9000 shipped way back in 1984, but could nearly pass for a shipping product today. So, since the LinnDrum II mock-ups look nothing like the current design, let’s feast our eyes on this instead. Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine and creator of some of its greatest models (including the MPC60 […]