proem headlines the CDM party Monday night, with myself and Lila’s Medicine, backed by Jay Smith and friends’ best visualists in Texas (brought to you by Livid Instruments). Photo (from the Decibel Festival, not in Austin): pinkpucca. Texas, here we come. Before the armies of bands hit Austin for South by Southwest, we’ve got some […]

Project Wonderland, rendered in Java3D, which was just open sourced. Not so awesome-looking, aesthetically. (The point here is more lightweight, online collaboration and utility.) But J3D can be useful, and this announcement is another win for open Java — not to mention, between JOGL and J3D, you can make a 3D project in Java look […]

If you’re in Austin for South by Southwest Interactive, you’ll want to duck out of the parade of open bars Web companies are offering and check out some of the live music and visualism happening. Saturday night, I’m judging a laptop battle as CDMotion contributor Dan Winckler is the evening’s VJ. Monday, as proem, Lila’s […]

Processing is an open-source coding tool, built in Java, designed specifically to be versatile for artists and friendly to non-coders. Code is elegant and simple, but can take advantage of all the potential power and performance (no, really) of Java. Java really can be fast enough to use in live performance situations, though its one […]

Daft who? In case you haven’t heard, the “it” French duo of the moment is Justice. Sure, they may not have a giant light-up pyramid on tour, but, their new album was one of the records we couldn’t stop listening to in 2007 (as opposed to Daft Punk, still riding the momentum of tunes we […]

Trent sez: “Buy all these music formats from meeeeeeeeeee!” Photo: Jenna Foxton. Artists are known to mouth off a bit about the Future of Music and Digital Distribution and whatnot, but Trent Reznor is putting his money — and not money — where his mouth is. Nine Inch Nails Menu of Ordering Options for Ghosts […]

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 […]