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 […]

The folks at IK Multimedia are sending free software to users of Pro Tools — anyone with a copy of Pro Tools LE or HD. (Apparently no love for Pro Tools M-Powered owners.) You get AmpliTube 2 DUO; it’s not the full AmpliTube 2, but it’s no slouch, with tuner, stomp, amp, cabinet+microphone, two models […]

VDMX, the “realtime video studio” from the makers of Grid, semi-modular live visualist tool for Mac, and very possibly the “world’s most mature beta software”, continues to pack goodness into each new beta release. But the most recent addition, just now available as part of the primary public beta release, warms my heart. The latest […]

Amazing how time crawls when you’re eagerly awaiting something. Such is the case with the BoomChik: it seems like ages ago that drum machine legend Roger Linn and synth legend Dave Smith “pre-announced” this synth/drum machine. It was actually just this time last year. Unfortunately, you’re going to be waiting a little longer: feedback from […]

Musician, composer, and musique concrete artist Henri Chopin has died, writes Seth: he has been and remains a figure whose sound work is very important to me, so i thought i’d share it with you all. he was a sound poet who used reel-to-reel tape as his paper, performance instrument, and collaborator. Chopin is lesser-known […]