Sega Master System, NES as Audio Effect; Videos Coming from Blip Fest

8-bit audiovisual party Blip Fest started last night here in New York, so it’s only natural we celebrate game systems used for music through the weekend in its honor. (Reminder: come meet up with me and Boing Boing’s Joel Johnson tonight, 6-8p, if you’re going to Blip. Facebook event / CDM post) Sega Master Bitcrunch […]

NYC: Blip Festival Thurs-Sun; Join Our 32-bit Meetup with Boing Boing Friday 6p

Living, eating, breathing Game Boys. Meneo, visual/musical artist on Game Boys. Photo (CC) rabato. Retro hardware? Vintage game machines? Old computers? New mobile devices? Whatever it is, we’ll make music and motion on it. The Blip Festival, the legendary international festival of vintage music and visual tech, invades New York today (Thursday) through Sunday. There’s […]

NYC: Handmade Music Now Monthly – 12/11 Event, Call for Works, Beep-It Workshop

Handmade Music, the regular series of DIY music tech parties CDM hosts with Etsy.com and Make Magazine in New York, is back. And it’s back in a big way: the event has a new home in Bushwick and will be held on an actual schedule monthly. The first event is next Thursday, December 11. After […]

AudioVisual Festival Performances Going Online: Sati and Wildbits from Cinesthesy 1.0

Last month saw an amazing lineup of European visualists performing in Créteil, Paris for the Cinesthesy 1.0 festival. If you missed the live streaming of this event, or would like to see some of it again, you’re in luck! Les Pixels Transversaux have been posting entire performances (as well as “extracts”) to Vimeo: SATI@CINESTHESY 1.0 […]

Survey: What Labels Would You Put on a “Genre” Knob?

The original microKORG genre-selecting knob, sure to baffle and delight with its nonsensical labels. Careful: you may actually transform yourself with the genres. Okay, first, a disclaimer: the fact that the upcoming microKORG XL has a “genre” knob for selecting presets isn’t big news. The original microKORG had genre-selectable presets, too. The beauty of the […]

Korg microKORG XL: Little Keys, with Purtier Looks, Vocoder, and Sounds

The microKORG is one of the great music instrument product hits of recent years. It’s a product that has managed to reach out of the claustrophobic, aging niche of traditional keyboard buyers to a wider audience of rockers and music enthusiasts. It’s not the only keyboard to be “cool” – hello, Moog – but it’s […]

Auditorium: Free Flash Music Game Creates Music with Streams of Particles

Auditorium is a fascinating free Flash game that turns interactive music arrangement into a series of puzzles. The center of the game is what the creators call “flow” – a visual stream of particles that can be directed to audio “containers” to create sound. The user places circles with icons signifying direction in the stream […]

Now on the Nintendo DS: OpenSoundControl

Big news from the homebrew Nintendo DS scene: OpenSoundControl is now supported, thanks to a community contribution from Tim Wood. That means you can drag your stylus around and send high-resolution data straight to software running on your computer. From the DSMI site: OSC is an emerging standard for exchanging music control signals that is […]

All Fruity, No Loops: FL Studio to Remove All Melodic Samples; Murky License, Content

Deadmau5 roars, and FL drops all melodic content? Hey, whatever – FL users stay loyal to their app and it’s now BYO sample time. Photo (CC) iamdonte. The FL Studio community was rocked earlier this month as producer Deadmau5 claimed the use of his samples was “stealing,” even though these samples were bundled with the […]

Guitar Riggers: A Girl Plays Violin on Pogo Stick, A Man Dressed as Preset Cliches

Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig Hero video contest winners were unveiled today. At the top of the charts, players not surprisingly demonstrated fine craft, sharp execution, great playing, and so on. But let’s skip straight to the oddities in the bunch. Like the girl with the violin on a pogo stick. And there is an appearance […]