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 […]

Max/MSP: it does a body good! Photo (CC Yao Chung-Han / worKingLab) If you haven’t been following Max 5 updates, the folks at Cycling ’74 have been aggressively bug squashing. The changelog for 5.0.6 alone is exhaustive. (Via @rekkerd on Twitter, of rekkerd.org.) Updated: Also new in Max 5, it’s now possible as of 5.0.6 […]

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 […]