The ways in which people can reimagine the beloved turntable seems boundless. We’ve seen bass guitar turntables, computer scratching visualizations, turntable-controlled vibrating chaise longues, and turntables embedded in tree trunks as art installations. Still, there’s more: TurntablistPC is an ongoing art project coupling a vintage turntable with a vintage PC, creating a hybrid, record-playing server […]

One of the wonderful things about music in general is that basically anything can become a musical instrument — digital, electronic, or otherwise. The barrier to entry is neither skill nor means, but will. (or is that general craziness?) Musician and builder Eric Johnson surprised us at the last handmade music get-together in Brooklyn with […]

Footsteps from the abyss of total unawareness, musician and musicologist Clive Wearing has two lifelines: love and music. Suffering from an amnesia that robs him of nearly all memories beyond a few seconds, these bring him back from a waking death and become life and being itself: “I picked up some music,” Deborah wrote, “and […]

The sounds are lush and silky smooth, like a cello making love to an angel. The new, enhanced graphics are … breathtaking, in their spectacular range of colors and pixels. Yes, folks, it’s time for another multimedia extravaganza, as released on NES cartridge. This stuff is what we like to call “high fidelity.” It’s the […]

Not to be outdone by Logic Pro 8’s launch last week, Cakewalk has let slip the basic feature set of their latest version of their flagship SONAR DAW, with upgrades available immediately. What’s new — with an interesting emphasis on MIDI: A new step sequencer, looking reminiscent of tools like FL Studio (Fruity Loops), though […]

Numbers make beautiful art — especially illegal numbers. There’s something beautiful about making art with mundane tools, making something creative with something because, not simply in spite of, its limitations. And there’s likewise something surreal about Microsoft’s latest ad campaign for Office for the Mac: get artists to make subversive art with its old version […]

Tommy responds to our call for screen grabs of software with this fascinating Jitter patch: He writes: used lloopp and jitter runtime to make this instrument that uses a firewire camera as a source for effecting sound generators. i like this shot because of the video feedback. What’s lloopp? Glad you asked. It’s a live […]

As the last couple of decades have led to making music in software, some of the materiality of physical instruments is lost. No matter how much you love your hardware synths, odds are you spent at least a little time looking into the void of a computer screen. And to the public, much of that […]

The original Monome 40h music (and other media) controller has been replaced by new models, led by the new 256, a 16×16 grid. The buttons are smaller, retaining the approximate size and form factor of the original, but you get more buttons, a wooden case, and other improvements. Pre-orders are set for September 26. Lots […]