Vienna-based design firm GP designpartners sponsored the FRONT musical interface design as part of its annual student thesis project. We’ve certainly heard these promises before for alternative interfaces: “a really new music instrument — without using classical paradigms. an instrument for new sounds, that gives the musician the possibility to express himself — even live […]

Perfect for barbeques, says Hercules. This (sadly, wireless DJ-free) barbeque via Flickr, by Adactico. Yes, just in time for the summer grilling season. Hercules — known in the 80s for their video cards and more recently as makers of a rather flimsy DJ controller — have introduced a toy-like wireless DJ controller. As a serious […]

Great sample libraries usually give you painstakingly-recorded collections of equipment and instruments to which you lack access. It’s a chance to get into someone else’s kitchen. Usually, that isn’t literal. In this case, it is. Welsh’s Synthesizer Cookbook has taken hundreds of samples of cookware from a US$5.95 price to free, providing kitchen sounds for […]

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 […]