I wondered if anyone else had used calculators as music controllers. The answer? But of course. Here’s a classic Russian calculator model controlling arrangements in Ableton Live. It appears in this example as though this is working as a USB (QWERTY) keyboard substitute, rather than as a MIDI controller, but you get more of the […]

It’s hard to write the first line of this, because in this case any reference to Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” is wildly redundant. This is a calculator. He is the operator. This is a real, working HP48 graphing calculator playing MIDI events. You can go, like, graph stuff with it afterwards, do some Calculus. And we […]

You may have noticed that I’ve been a little quiet in recent months. The Game On Projection Mapping project is partly to blame, but the biggest culprit will be making its first public appearance as well this Saturday, and I’ve called it Herovision. Herovision Testing Party from Jaymis on Vimeo. The above video features a […]

DRM on displays and projectors? Believe it. Apple, like many computer vendors, has added DRM to its new laptops in the form of HDCP (which, bizarrely, stands for “High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection”). This is doubly odd, because Apple cited technical restrictions of Blu-Ray as a reason for not including those drives on their machines – […]

Running Vista? Running Processing? This is important: you’ll want to apply this fix if working with fullscreen apps (as you would be as a live visualist). The short version: there’s a property to set if you’re working in an IDE (Eclipse / NetBeans. If you’re just working in Processing, the easiest thing to do is […]

Tired: Trying to get publicity for software updates. Wired: using publicity for software as a reason to finish an update! Ilias Bergstrom has a new release up of an open-source project designed to make it easier to play live with Processing. With all-important support for 0156 (which again restores proper fullscreen operation, this is the […]

Create Digital Motion is proud to be a sponsor of the 2009 MGFest. It’s a huge festival, now covering multiple US cities, covering all aspects of visual technology – including the stuff we especially like, at the convergence of live visuals, VJing, interactive graphics, and music. Now’s the time to enter your stuff, as we’d […]

Musical gifts – the best kind. Photo (CC) ex.libris. It’s nearly the holiday season, and as CDM has just completed its fourth birthday, I want to give all of us a present. The idea: a holiday guide that’s a bit different. The first CDM treeware. We’ll have PDF and print-on demand versions. And part of […]

We routinely talk about how the interface paradigm of a computer — screen, QWERTY, trackpad – isn’t optimal for music. But how many of you have, in a pinch, done a live laptop set with just your computer, and found some way to make it work? The Stanford University Laptop Orchestra, set to play this […]

A really striking piece in NPR today, via Gina Blaber’s Twitter (thanks, Tim O’Reilly): Humans Turning Up Volume In Oceans [NPR “Science Out of the Box”] A new report shows the way in which sound travels through the ocean has been impacted by global warming. A growing community of artists are working in media like […]