In my excitement over the addition of OpenSoundControl (which could just as easily be called OpenVisualControl) to VDMX5, several commenters noted I wasn’t giving props to all the apps that do support OSC. There’s Isadora, for one, a favorite among dancers and VJs (and our friend Momo the Monster), and semi-hidden support in Modul8. Cyberpatrolunit […]

In case you haven’t seen it, several readers wrote in to tell us about how the “journalists” at Gizmodo went around CES disabling video screens. The invention used to do it — the TV-B-Gone — is capable of far more worthy goals, like disabling the invasive crap on Fox News at an airport. (Addendum: unless […]

Quick: you’ve got to sell UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC’s) to a mass market! How to do it? Well, Intel decided to show off pro audio and music production on the Linux-based Transmission, from Trinity Audio, as we saw earlier this week. I’m not entirely sure what got Intel thinking our geeky way, but I’m going […]

All Kaoss, All the Time: In a world of endless choices, what happens to the creative power of limitations? Back in November, we saw Norman Fairbanks make an album entirely on Tenori-On, Yamaha’s interactive blinking-lights button pad. “Ah,” you said. “But that sounds suspiciously like the music of Toshio Iwai, the Tenori-On’s composer-inventor. And it […]

  MIDI is back, baby. Or to say it another way: musicians still care about how to manipulate notes, rhythms, and timbral control. That means that, for all the powerful audio-warping tools you pack into a product, the compositional, musical power of software lives and dies on MIDI. But can you really do MIDI any […]

Regine at We Make Money Not Art has a fantastic overview (summarizing a recent workshop) of presenting data and numbers visually: Visualizing: tracing an aesthetics of data It’s a great read; well worth working through the whole thing. The art of presenting data more expressively is exploding fast. It was a big part of the […]

Current TV has the full hour of Scotch Mist, an hour-long taping of Radiohead performing In Rainbows. I have to say, while I enjoyed the album, I think this top-to-bottom performance has even more soul in it; you really get a sense of the focus and craft of the songs as they’re played live. Oh, […]

More reasons you love OSC? You can get input from a SpaceNavigator 3D mouse, and translate the data into Max/MSP/Jitter, Quartz Composer, VDMX5 (as mentioned earlier today), Processing, and other tools — plus everything else, via MIDI. The solution: the inexpensive Mac utility OSCulator, covered this evening over on CDMusic: OSCulator for Mac: Alternative Control, […]

Want to make music and motion with unusual inputs, like Wii controllers, Lemur multi-touch touchscreens, Monomes, and (now) 3D mice? OSCulator is a wonderful app that supports OpenSoundControl and sends MIDI events, with support for some hardware that can’t be supported any other way. The new 2.5 version adds new stuff: SpaceNavigator 3D mouse device […]