Speaking of free footage … Bart, from the terrific indie Windows VJ software Resolume, has posted bunches of new, free footage to their site: Resolume Footage Archive Lots of good stuff, from abstract to found. Of course, all of this raises some questions: will you be spotted using recognizable footage? (I’ve certainly been at parties […]

Even as some visualists try to distance themselves from DJs (ahem), the notion of a “DVJ” — taking steps toward integrating VJing more closely with DJing — is gaining traction. It seems to be far, far bigger in Europe than here in the US (surprise). Pioneer, for one, is actively pushing VJing in Europe, even […]

It’s appeared elsewhere, but if you haven’t looked closely at the Guitar Hero-playing robot (“Guitar Heronoid”) created by Rafael Mizrahi and Tal Chalozin of GarageGeeks, you might have missed just how obsessive this project is: It has working, robotic hands. The actions are fairly simple: strum and hit buttons. Of course, that’s just the mechanical […]

We’re serious when we say laptop performances — the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra (“CybOrk”), influenced by similar groups like Princeton’s PLOrk, uses laptops as instruments, augmented by alternative controllers. Here’s the surprise: when they record it, they intentionally treat it as you would an acoustic ensemble. Photo by Elena Krysanova. My feature story for Keyboard […]

200 frames per second: that’s the “smooth slow motion capture” speed of Sony’s rather affordable HVR-V1P HDV camera. It really makes slow-motion capture accessible to the rest of us. Jaymis has been testing this mode on his new camera. Here are some early results (all the more impressive if you watch through to the full-motion […]

One of the many terrific snaps by photomaven LauraLovesToPhotoBands. Pray she shows up at your next gig! We look forward to the day when visualists on music tours are norms, rather than exceptions. And no, playing lots of pre-rendered footage and/or hiding someone in the back of the house does not count. Fortunately, our own […]

You know how drummers tap desks, objects, and anything around them incessantly, often unaware of the fact that they’re doing it, until people get annoyed? Well, now you don’t need a drummer around: you can program a Game Boy to do the same thing. Jowan Sebastian has built a brilliant, elegant application for Game Boys […]

MOTU’s MachFive is an oft-overlooked software sampler option for both Mac and Windows. The sampler market is a crowded one, but MachFive does have some nice features, not least being a unique, one-screen interface. The sampler hasn’t quite kept pace with recent releases from Native Instruments, Cakewalk, and others, so this week’s release of version […]

If the readers here did, I suspect musicians and record labels would be richer, not poorer, music would be spread further around the planet, and policy might actually make sense. If you haven’t yet read comments on last week’s analysis of an industry push for DRM on radio, do it now. On second though, as […]

Wired doesn’t seem to care about anything musical unless it has the word “mashup” in it. But at least they get this right: Jamaican musicians understood the mashup long before Wired editors did. DJ Spooky is putting together a compilation to celebrate the 40th anniversary of reggae label Trojan Records, and as he talks to […]