Weather Report: Multi-Touch + Surface Temperature = Music on Earth

For an increasing number of artists, data is becoming the raw material for creative work. Most of this has focused on visual media, but in the digital space, you can just as easily use sound. Sometimes the results are aesthetic only; sometimes they tell you something about the numbers being sonified. But either way, sound […]

Preset Pack: It’s a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod, Modular Moog World

I usually don’t pick up presets and sound libraries on CDM, but this one deserves an exception. Musicrow has built a preset pack for Arturia’s Moog Modular V. That’s the software emulation of the truly modular Moogs — the ones with patch cords — so this gives you what you don’t get out of the […]

One-Fader Control Surfaces: A Cubase-Only Entry, vs. Everything Else

This is the new Steinberg control surface. (See the hands-on video at SonicState.) It’s built to integrate out of the box with Cubase 4, which if you’re a Cubase 4 user should be good. You or I might give it a name like “CubaseControl” or something, but Steinberg has seen fit to call it the […]

Weekend Inspiration: Coke Bottle as Tribal Percussion, and the Future of Adaptive Music

Troels Folmann is one of our favorite composers at CDM. The fact that he’s a game composer both incidental and essential — it’s not that he’s scoring a Tomb Raider title that matters, it’s that game composition requires a new, fluid way of thinking about form, and Dr. Folmann (he did a dissertation topic on […]

Weekend Inspiration: NIN + Monome + Lemur, Trackers

In case you haven’t seen it, Nine Inch Nails has taken to the multi-touch Lemur control surface and More Buttons Than Thou top-end Monome. There’s a short video of an experiment combining the two with a real (MIDI-enabled) Yamaha piano. It’s just under a minute, but already evocative — I’m not entirely sure why Alessandro […]

Weekend Inspiration: Martin Böttger's Ever-Changing Geometries

Whether in three-dimensional videos or paper sculptures, artist Martin Böttger manipulates organic, fluid geometry like a child with blocks. An artist working with Maya, vvvv, and Processing, his work demonstrates that even simple elements can yield a variety of creative products. “Transformer” is an intentional nod to the robots and movie — with good reason; […]

Weekend Inspiration: Martin Böttger’s Ever-Changing Geometries

Whether in three-dimensional videos or paper sculptures, artist Martin Böttger manipulates organic, fluid geometry like a child with blocks. An artist working with Maya, vvvv, and Processing, his work demonstrates that even simple elements can yield a variety of creative products. “Transformer” is an intentional nod to the robots and movie — with good reason; […]

Gibson Guitar to Guitar Hero Maker: We Own All Digital Musical Reality

Wannabe musicians: now the exclusive legal domain of Gibson Guitar? Photo: Unhindered by Talent. Are you making music without real acoustic instruments? You know, in, like, virtual reality? Then you may have stepped into a strange, alternate dimension. Let’s call it, for the sake of argument, The Gibson Zone. They control the horizontal. They control […]

NIN Ghosts: An Open Call for YouTube Visualists

We’re big fans of NIN’s new album, Ghosts. Now, visualists will get to freely interpret the album in an open YouTube “festival”… I’ve come out of my self-imposed solitary confinement only due to my man love for Trent Reznor. (Don’t ask.) Following up on the huge success of the Ghosts I-IV release (grossing a cool […]