Nice work if you can get it: visualist Toby / tobyz, aka *spark, had one heck of a live visual rig for the Geneva Motor Show’s Ford booth. One ongoing challenge for live VJs is making it clear what they’re doing. Solution: “VJ Crew” t-shirts, lovely women (can’t hurt), and, of course, giant touchscreens for […]

In the New York area (or within Amtrak distance)? Mark your calendars for August 23. We’re teaming up again with Make Magazine and homemade marketplace/community Etsy to host the second evening of handmade musical creations at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. This means software and hardware, sensors and controllers and game systems, custom Max, Pd, and […]

Ardour, the free and open source DAW for Mac and Linux, has already won some fans by providing robust audio multitrack features in free software, along with some unique innovations (like robust support for inter-app JACK audio routing). But one major complaint has been a lack of serious MIDI tools. MIDI functionality is baked in, […]

What’s that flowing out of this classic synth? Could it be a ghostly life force, ready for incarnation into a modern Prophet — erm, synth, that is? (Hooray for bdu’s lovely Flickr collection of synth ephemera. Dave Smith Instruments, the boutique synth shop responsible for the beloved real analog-meets-digital Evolver line, have been hard at […]

My God … it’s full of screens: If you really want live visualism and VJing to make an impact, step one is giving your display mechanism a major upgrade. Great content and artistry matters, but without a way of communicating to them the audience — well, you musicians know what it’s like when the PA […]

Andrew Stone has added the term Elton Johning to the Urban Dictionary; head over there and give it a thumbs up. Quick review: the term means to unplug from the Web to allow yourself some creative space, a concept suggested by Sir Elton John himself, who wants someone to tear down the Internet so we […]

Bridging the gap between music visualizer and game, Masaya Matsurra’s musika brings a unique experience to Apple’s iPod. Matsurra, best known as the creator of PaRappa the Rapper for the original PlayStation, has long used Apple’s tools as a means of creative expression. He sees the iPod as a natural for interactive music visualization. “The […]

For many, the notion of producing sound by patching spaghetti-like nests of cords in hardware is a historical curiosity. Even among those who appreciate this hardware for what it is, conventional wisdom says such instruments aren’t really modern. (Don’t even ask the various universities who gave up on using and maintaining the gear entirely, relegating […]

Atom Heart, looking in this shot a bit baffled by Iwai’s new Tenori-On. Can you create a new electronic musical instrument and make it succeed, without relying on the models of the past? That’s the ongoing challenge of instrument design, and it’s one that’s been largely ignored by the incremental revisions of most large music […]

We’re pleased at CDM to introduce a new verb: to Elton John will hereby mean to unplug from the Web in order to do creative work. No blogging, emergency emails only (heck, ignoring the emergency emails will be even more satisfying), no RSS, etc. In all seriousness, it’s a great idea. The Web will be […]