Musical activists are opposing a Japanese nuclear reprocessing plant. What’s in it for you: free musical downloads opposing contamination by nuclear radiation. (Any pro-radiation readers will have to look elsewhere.) Nuclear reprocessing is a way of reclaiming spent nuclear fuels. Sounds great, right — recycling and whatnot? Unfortunately, there are serious risks involved. The plant, […]

What has type got to do with motion? Plenty, if you listen to Erik Spiekermann. Type is rhythm, and rhythm is how you read meaning. As you first start to watch clips from the documentary Helvetica, you’re initially unaware that its ubiquitous star is staring you in the face. Then, it’s everywhere, generic yet insistent, […]

That’s not special effects. Bjork has actually learned how to make her head levitate. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed by the new video for Bjork’s latest single, Earth Invaders. I loved the initial imagery: an organic, swirling background, textures mapped over Bjork’s eerily floating head, and marching figures dressed like trees […]

That’s not special effects. Bjork has actually learned how to make her head levitate. I have to admit, I was a bit disappointed by the new video for Bjork’s latest single, Earth Invaders. I loved the initial imagery: an organic, swirling background, textures mapped over Bjork’s eerily floating head, and marching figures dressed like trees […]

Kirsty Komuso is documenting a class project to use Wii gaming controllers to manipulate sound. The secret: feed the students pizza. (Hey, low blood sugar is most definitely not helpful when working with interactive projects.) It is amazing what you can achieve with a class of advanced interaction design students, fuelled [sic] by 12 pizzas […]

Digital artists, visualists, VJs … invariably, we all get stuck trying to figure out how to make projection look fantastic in tiny spaces. The challenge: make a big image even with a short distance to the projection surface. DigitalPerformance magazine, an online blog/zine out of the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre in New York, has begun […]

How attitudes change. Once viewed as cheap and cheezy, portable, battery-powered Casio keyboards suddenly seem kinda cool in retrospect. The Casio VL-1, perhaps the most infamous of the Casiotone line, featured mechanical beats, paper-thin sounds, and buttons that barely qualified as a keyboard, and doubled as a calculator. Now, not only do those very points […]

Laptop musicians, had enough of people saying you look like you might be checking your email? Try actually checking your email. That’ll show ’em. David Battino (who also runs O’Reilly’s Digital Media site) did an “advertorial” for Electronic Musician on Frontier Design’s AlphaTrack. He goes into lots of details as far as assignments, but as […]

Jamiroquai sound engineer Rick Pope joins the mile-high recording club. Funny, when I try to set up this way on a plane, my neighbors get annoyed. When you hear the repeated stories about how traditional recording studios are dead, I suspect your first thought is not, “Finally! The dream of in-flight recording has its day!” […]

After early driver releases by MOTU, RME, Roland/Edirol, and a few others, the Vista driver landscape has been pretty quiet. (M-Audio, anyone?) Some drivers will work anyway, after dismissing some warning dialog boxes. But having Vista-ready drivers is, of course, ideal. PreSonus is the latest, with new 32-bit and 64-bit Vista drivers (and XP/XP x64) […]