Five hundred bucks. In music tech terms, that usually gets you, what, a single app bundle? Now, it can get you a whole computer, pre-loaded with a bunch of music software. It may not be as powerful as a modern laptop, but it’s also in a cute, smaller form factor you can keep everywhere in […]

Yep, that’s an ExpressCard slot. Photo (CC) Ja-ae (Jarawee) – hello, Bangkok! (Know we have some readers out there.) Tim Hanlon of gizmag.com recently got an IdeaPad S10 – Lenovo’s lovely, $400 “netbook” – to test. He didn’t just do the usual benchmarks, though. His review also included the unlikely choice of Ableton Live and, […]

Photo: Joe Lambert / Shakinda, capturing that special Manheim atmosphere. How do you put on a great festival for visualists? Ask the crew behind B Seite (that’s B Side, for the native language of us current and former British Empire subjects). Visualist and Quartz Composer guru Shakinda (as seen previously in free tutorials here) was […]

Musical Applications for Multi-Touch Interfaces from BricK Table on Vimeo. Across series of colored bars, sounds warp and mutate. Vines entangle as organic threads of music. Fingers and objects traverse sonic landscapes in surprising, mysterious ways. Welcome to the worlds of BricK, the musical table interface by Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis, which, charged with […]

tbeta preview from ~ on Vimeo. Look out: multi-touch has a new rising star. The tbeta library (short, oddly, for The Beta) is an open-source framework for computer vision and multi-touch, and it’s particularly good at following your fingers. It’s a descendent of touchlib, with some of its ideas, though a completely new code base. […]

Sorry, had to quote the Coulton anthem for Portal, “Still Alive.” Processing 1.0 has finished final release status. Why that matters, on Create Digital Motion: Processing: Revolutionary Creative Coding Tool Now 1.0, No Longer Beta In my mind, it’s certainly one of the most unusual betas in creative software history. Why this is important for […]

  In the midst of the US election, I missed an important announcement: the smash hit Buddha Machine, a mysterious little $25 gadget that generates its own ambient music, has a sequel. You might think of Buddha Machine 2 as Buddha Machine Pro. New features: A bigger sonic palette, with nine loops Pitch bend (which […]

I heart Processing. Image (made with Processing, of course): (CC) Nik Rowell. The creative, visual development platform Processing has undergone what may be one of the longest, strangest betas ever – in a good way. What other “beta” has had tomes written about it, tens of thousands of students studying it (in some large programs, […]

Find more videos like this on Zoybar Ziv bar Ilan, founder/designer of Zoybar, has created a “modular hardware platform” for creating custom electric instruments and effects. The fruits of these labors: an insane cross-breeding experiment combining a Korg KAOSS Pad KP3 with an electric guitar. The results look like something the evil supergeek in an […]

The stroboscope, dating back to 1832, is likely the earliest animation device. This is motion graphics, 19th Century-style: rotating a series of images and sync the speed of the rotation so the observer sees motion. Modern hacker, bender, chiptune musician, and artist Gijs Gieskes has his own spin on the idea: he’s built an electronic […]