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 […]

Even with the success of beginner-targeted software like GarageBand, computer music production is still something a lot of musicians have only started to explore. And while there are computer-savvy players of every instrument, there’s no question guitars are underrepresented for the size of the market versus, say, keyboards. Sonoma’s RiffWorks has been one software entry […]

We’ve seen terrific iPhone / iPod Touch apps for MIDI and OpenSoundControl, including Mrmr running VJ apps, i3L outputing to MIDI, and free, cross-platform Pd tools. With these, you can run visual, music, and other apps. But the latest addition is a very polished-looking app dedicated entirely to DMX, the protocol of choice for automated […]

Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK. Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and […]

Last month we had a little teaser of Psychadelic Fluids, as CDM reader Memo was preparing to install the project (as part of a crew put together by Seeper) at the massive Glastonbury festival in the UK. Well, the festival is over now, and Memo has followed up with a video documenting the project, and […]

I really adore Julian Oliver’s work; he’s constantly finding ways of making three-dimensional, virtual spaces more expressive. We’ve seen Quake as a musical instrument, gaming actors as insane digital painters, and 3D interactive game equivalents of Grantz Graf. But this piece is unusually poetic and moving to me. It features a figure inside a virtual […]