Those who fail to learn from history are doomed never to make anything as cool as 17th Century keyboard makers. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announces (via its Twitter feed, no less) that it has gotten its Musical Instruments collection online. Over 800 inspiring objects of all kinds are available with photos, maker information, […]

Electro-Harmonix has made a quick-and-dirty vocal effects box. Usable parameters, good fun, and $200 – sure, it may not be the highest-fidelity vocal box ever, but what’s not to love? Our friend Collin Cunningham at MAKE gets the jump on this one. It’s got some surprisingly unique features: 256-band vocoder “designed by the same EMS […]

Okay, so you’ve seen the painful demo video for Microsoft Research’s Songsmith software – it was intended to me tongue-in-cheek, I think, but the self-parody didn’t quite work. But the idea of auto-accompaniment software that interprets your recorded singing remains impressive. And I’ve gotten some tips that it is possible to make Songsmith sound good. […]

N0stromo tells us he is planning to port his “Piggy” LittleGPTracker (lgpt), the tracker currently on the Linux GamePark platform, to the Sony PSP. LGPT has the interface of littlesounddj, as known on the Game Boy, and can even drive MIDI (meaning this could be a great time to figure out MIDI output on the […]

pauk on pages from Pauk on Vimeo. Part of what sets apart the open source monome controller instrument (cdm tag | site) is that, despite its minimalist grid of pads, it really behaves like an extension of software. That grid can be thought of as touch-ready pixels. Using Pages, an app developed by phortran that […]

CDM has been publishing for over four years. For once, I actually can say … nothing. Please provide your own snark in the comment space below. The CDM family thanks you. Beamz ad, there’s a new sheriff in town. Gizmodo: Beamz Infomercial Is Most Stupid Promo Video in History [Published in the more innocent times […]

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with slow motion video, and you people aren’t doing a very good job of hiding your interest either – “high speed camera price” was our #5 search term for the last month. The article that search result points to is from August 2006, and back then a camera shooting […]

In a surprise announcement (well, surprising me, at least), the experimental MySong shown by Microsoft Research earlier this year will be available for sale. US$29.95 will buy you a downloadable auto-accompaniment tool. Windows-only, but it sounds as though a Mac release is in store (seriously). It’s a bit like Band-in-a-Box for singers: sing in a […]

I’m going to make this a minimalist post because I’ve said what I’ll say about Kodu, the one really cool part of Microsoft’s keynote yesterday, on Create Digital Motion. (Am I the only person who wishes Sparrow had just done the whole keynote?) But have a look at the shot above. One of the complaints […]

“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]