Getting fed up with all this Lilliputian nonsense of mobile devices and ever-smaller portable music gadgets? Well, here’s a massive leap in the opposite direction: DIY sound electronics maker and David Crowder*Band drummer Bwack created the biggest, most oversized sampler he could design. From emprise34’s xanga blog, details of Bwack’s Herculean creation: he was commissioned […]

“Where the future is being made … today!” You already know Processing can create wonderful visual stuff. It can output movie files, so it can be a companion to your live visual tool of choice. It also happens to be a great way to experiment with OpenGL, so you can work with shader code and […]

The faux-Pan Am logo. The sleek, mod, curved white casing. The elegant controls. Yes, this is indeed a synth that would look at home in the space station in Kubrick’s 2001. Technically not the future so much as the 1960’s version of the future – but surely we’re getting around to reshaping our future to […]

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab. I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to […]

I’ll be in Melbourne from tomorrow, presenting CDMo at the “DIY TV: Video, UGC, Mobile and IP TV” edition of the globetrotting think-tank X|Media|Lab. I’ll be talking to some smart people about where visualists fit in the future of TV, and while my head’s full of my ideas of what’s happening next, I’d love to […]

Amidst some of the gimmicky options, some serious tools are making their way to Apple’s mobile platform. Case in point: Faber Acoustical, a developer of audio analysis and acoustical tools for the Mac, has new iPhone apps for generating and analyzing signals. SignalScope is a real-time spectrum analyzer and oscilloscope. Interestingly, it’s not just for […]

A sadly out-of-print album of Delia Derbyshire’s music, with Brian Hodgson, Don Harper. It came as no surprise to me that Delia Derbyshire, composer and BBC Radiophonic Workshop maestra, would have created incredibly forward-thinking music in the 60s. But when one track seemed to predict IDM and modern electronica, the story of Derbyshire’s vintage “dance” […]

Quick! What do you do in an emergency when you need to re-authorize software for a gig? Good news: Ableton will not be “evil.” (see photo at right; thanks, Amanda.) It happens: a hard drive dies, or you lose an entire computer and switch machines. Now, in an ideal world with no copy protection, this […]

Nerd warfare. It’s like Mexican wrestling for people who enjoy, um, patching together interactive tools for music and visuals! And on one fateful Toronto day, the open source challenger took the prize. As promised, a group of music tech geeks challenged DIY multimedia software environments Pure Data (Pd) and Max/MSP to a mano-a-mano contest of […]

Mari Kimura is an experimental string player extraordinaire, regularly venturing to the edge of what’s possible at the meeting of acoustic and electronic technology. GuitarBot is a “guitar”-playing robot (perhaps more reminiscent of a shamisen), an invention of Eric Singer, founder of the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots. The two meet above in a […]