Digital tech is fantastic — but I’m equally inspired by the real-for-real attitude that extended into the early digital age. Now that the French duo Justice have done a send up of a ridiculous number of early “motion graphics” (well, before they were really called that), I think there’s plenty of opportunity to get ideas […]

SearchBurst, which visualizes “burst” effects on Yahoo! Search, as world events impact search queries. Built in Processing by the yHaus team (Aaron Koblin specifically), with code/support from our friend and code hero Toxi, and Mike Chang. Imagine VJing with a stream of live snapshots from partygoers — or playing live data from the Web on […]

For further study of the brain, I suggest making a lime JELL-O model. Yum. As an addendum to why trying to make computer models musically creative can be so disastrous, maybe the problem is we fail to understand what creativity is. Scientists funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) have […]

Microsoft Research has done some amazing work; it doesn’t always move me to tears, but there’s some fantastic stuff that deserves real recognition. And MySong is … well, technologically impressive, if musically painful. It’s a sort of collision between AutoTune and Band-in-a-Box: it recognizes a melody as input, then harmonizes that melody. The vocal input […]

  Plugging stuff together is fun. By jurvetson. There’s a disturbing amount of free sound-making stuff out there, enough to clutter up your VST folder and make you forget where you put that multi-tap delay you wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. So, as a regular, erm, public service, I’ll be semi-regularly rounding up some of […]

We’ve seen QWERTY keyboards recycled into various music controllers, but here’s a DIY project that makes actual sounds: A home-made synthesizer based off of an old function generator and a standard qwerty board. Three wave types–sin, square, sawtooth–and HI+LO outputs. It connects to the keyboard with a stereo 1/4″ cable (TRS) so new controllers can […]

Correction: the South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin is not making a preview of all the bands playing the festival this year, so someone else has done it for them (Thanks, Wells in comments, for setting me straight). But, hey, perhaps this not-so-kosher torrent will lead you to some good music — or, best […]

When Adobe acquired Macromedia, a lot of people thought that’d be the end of Director. After all, Director and Flash have had increasingly overlapping capabilities for some time, and Director seemed like something people used years ago. Think again: talk to people doing interactive design, and Director — for better or worse — lives on. […]

You’re an incurable font geek and you love sound. Can’t choose? Combine them. The MeekFM synth is both a visual synthesizer for typography, and a synthesizer — it actually sonifies the letterforms you generate. This is synesthesia on such a high geeky level that my mind is blown wrapping my head around it. But I […]

Photo: Gary Kibler for CDM. At long last, the Yamaha Tenori-On, the unusual sampling/sequencing instrument bestrewn in light-up buttons, is getting its worldwide release. And it’s going to be an amazing party. Launch cities: Frankfurt and Berlin, Germany Paris, France Montreal, Quebec New York, NY San Francisco, CA (most appropriately) Tokyo, Japan The tour kicks […]