VisualVox Polyphonic Tone Manipulation: The Indie, EUR25 Celemony?

Sonic scientist Peter Neubäcker of Melodyne has been wowing Internet audiences for some time with the automagical powers of the company’s Direct Note Access (DNA). The vision: manipulate individual pitches as easily as MIDI notes, even in polyphonic passages of a single instrument. At NAMM last month, the company showed the first product, Melodyne editor, […]

Attack of the Remix: Soda Jerk Interview by Simulcast

Friend of CDM Simulcast caught up with Australian video remixers Soda Jerk last year, to talk about their technically intense, epic, narrative remixes. Soda_Jerk are two remix artists who create brand spanking new stories with their compositions. They work across several mediums but are probably best known for their entirely sample based audiovisual films that […]

Respect Your VJ: A Manifesto for Visual Gigs

Zarah working in residence at the wonderful Experimental Television Center here in New York State. Deserving of love and respect? Heck, yes. And so are you. The person hiring you may just need some hand-holding about how to give it to you. Zarah Cabañas akaLady Firefly has a radical concept: what if you treated visualists […]

Vocoder Mega-Round-up: From its History to FL Studio Tutorial, Depeche Mode

Doepfer Vocoder module, as photographed by our friend stretta (Matthew Davidson). Sure, the vocoder may now be something of an electronic music cliché now, but it got its beginnings as a mechanism of encoding speech. It was one of the first electronic instruments. It helped inspire the conceptual model for all digital communication. And, those […]

Telefon Tel Aviv on Emusic; Charlie Cooper on the New Album, Title, New Beginnings

Emusic added Telefon Tel Aviv’s new album, Immolate Yourself, which was released on the same week as the loss of Charlie Cooper, half of the duo. Cooper’s death has saddened electronic music lovers worldwide, and made the album title seem much bleaker. But I want to excerpt a couple of Charlie Cooper’s quotes to Emusic’s […]

Rain Diablo Audio Quad Laptop: Powerful Enough to Be Kind of Ridiculous

Rain Recording make audio-ready notebooks – that is, they’re pre-tested to function well with audio software, with Windows tweaks, driver selection, and configuration all chosen and tested for music and visual production, and no crapware installed. They’re one of a handful of music-friendly vendors that does that (see also: PCAudioLabs, etc.). Given that the PC […]

Remixing Live Today: Wreck and Salvage Streaming "Tricorn" Now

Web based, international “unextinguishable tire fire, except in video. 40 rabbits on Nyquil who all think they can sing Country Road.” Wreck and Salvage will be going live soon with the first installment of Tricorn. Tricorn Borgnine Promotional Device from wreckandsalvage on Vimeo. The show will consist of live long-form collaborative remixing from Nelson (Netherlands), […]

A Mutating Drum Step Sequencer, New MIDI Library for Processing

The creator of the wonderful glitchDS, repeaterDS, and cellDS Nintendo homebrew music apps has turned his sights to the free and open coding-for-artists desktop tool Processing. The result: a drum machine that mutates and morphs in wonderful ways via a command-line interface. (I almost put the command line bit in the headline, but while I […]

Switzerland's Mapping AV Festival: Deadline Extended, Preview of One of Our Favorite Fests

As packed as the global calendar for digital events can be, there are certain spots where you just say, “damn, I wish I had been there” — and the Mapping Festival in Geneva, Switzerland fits on that list for us. The good news: there’s still time to mark your calendar for May in Switzerland, and […]

Gallery: The Music and Visual Controllers of NAMM, Up Close

Jay Smith of Livid Instruments may be in the business of making controller hardware himself, but that doesn’t stop him from appreciate the knob-laden goodness of the NAMM show floor. Jay’s own gear reveals a not-so-secret love of knobs and buttons and faders, and if you’re into that sort of thing, this year’s NAMM music […]