The Speakers and Processing-coded visualization got a fittingly-lovely venue in Italy. Photo by Chris O’Shea, via Flickr. Looks can be a powerful agent for changing how we think about sound. Pairing liquid, organic speakers with equally fluid and dynamic visualizations, the launch of Muon last month in Italy made this principle readily apparent. I’m all […]

They might be … robots. Yipes, they might be Cylons. Cylons look like us now! Run! Robosonic Eclectic: Morton Subotnik, They Might Be Giants, and robotic musical instruments on the same bill? That … doesn’t happen very often. But it does happen this weekend, starting tonight. With a lineup that includes They Might Be Giants, […]

Music hardware giant M-Audio has been one of the big obstacles to Vista compatibility for many users. (We certainly heard from many of you that you didn’t want to upgrade until M-Audio support was ready.) They’re announcing driver support today. Note that “announcing” doesn’t necessarily mean they’re available right this instant, but it does sound […]

M-06, the previously Japan-only game that allows you to transform a Nintendo DS into a guitar, is coming to the US via Ubisoft, reports Newsweek’s OneUp. (What’s this? DS music in Newsweek? Times have changed!) Exclusive: Ubisoft to Publish Jam Sessions, an Improved Version of Japanese Cult Hit Guitar Game, in North America This June […]

Via Music thing (be sure to read the comments, in which they sort out what it actually is), here’s another multi-touch music table built on freely-available tools: MultiTouch Console Quite a lot of tools have been connected to make this happen, but they’re all out there so you could do something similar. Let’s see if […]

The good news: Microsoft is taking multi-touch, camera tracking, and gestural technologies seriously, and they have what looks like a very nice implementation that will be one of the first commercial implementations. The bad news: it’ll cost US$10,000 out of the gate. That high price will mean you’ll see at places like T-Mobile stores and […]

Musicians, behind the technological curve? Not when it comes to interface design: we’ve been consistently ahead. Little wonder, as digital musicians look for ways of making digital media more expressive, with centuries of physical interface design in musical instruments to push those demands further. In other words, Microsoft is up to something, and I look […]

For many of us, few movies can inspire sound design quite like Star Wars. From the clash of lightsabers to the screech of TIE Fighters to … well, seriously, the whole set of movies sounds damn fine, even if you skipped the whole film and put the sound effects on loop. On its 30th anniversary, […]

Is the Wii controller the new mouse? They’re starting to pop up all over the place, with all sorts of applications. As the villain in Pixar’s The Incredibles says at the end of the film, “When everyone’s super, no one is.” The related principle is, “When everyone has a gimmick, it’s not a gimmick any […]