A book surprised our friend Anton, Jitter wizard and visualist: can feedback (video and otherwise) be understood more deeply in relation to consciousness? -Ed. Wandering through a Barnes & Noble book store on the way to the checkout the other day, the cover of a book grabbed my attention. The cover showed the intricate geometries, […]

I think we’ve reached a geekdom singularity. Nintendo Wii controller + physical computing + OpenSoundControl + Mac + Kyma granular synthesis = Star Wars lightsaber sounds? Nicely done, Matteo Milani! More details from these Kyma sound synthesis experts at Unidentified Sound Object, which also has lots of resources on sound design in general on the […]

What’s circuit bending? Glad you asked: West Coast vs. East Coast vs. Third Coast: now it’s on, circuit bending fans. If you’re in California or Minnesota and were cranky that New York got the awesome Bent Festival and you didn’t, it’s your turn this week. Thursday through Saturday, Bent is moving out to Los Angeles, […]

Two long-time favorite audio editors have gotten big updates recently. BIAS updated the Mac-only Peak Pro at the Messe show with an upgraded UI, ducking, mastering and playlist tools. And yesterday, Sony announced Sound Forge 9, with multichannel features, new mastering effects, and other features. That was quick: Sound Forge 8 and Peak Pro 5 […]

In cased you missed it on the CDMu Flickr pool, our friend Marco Raaphorst spent his Easter decorating eggs in soft synth land. Gather the kids around — it’s egg painting in the UI editor, followed by an egg hunt in Reaktor!

Two interesting Windows VST plug-ins hit this week. First up, Sonata, a rather nice “tone synth” for leads and pads and such has become free. (via our friends at rekkerd.org),) CPU hungry, so this looks like yet another chance to dial up some interesting sounds, throw them in the mix, and bounce. Tetra may be […]

Open Sound Control (OSC), an open protocol that can be used in place of MIDI, isn’t the right tool for everything. Hooking up a 4-octave keyboard with some knobs, for instance, makes a whole lot more sense in MIDI, and MIDI is widely supported. But I like OSC’s open-ended message structure for devices like the […]

Think vintage video hardware has nothing on classic analog music synths like the Moog and Buchla? Think again. The Rutt-Etra video synthesizer, circa 1972, did sophisticated video raster manipulations. The invention of Steve Rutt and Bill Etra, the Rutt-Etra may not have had its Keith Emerson, but it did inspire Nam Jun Paik and Gary […]

The Video Critter hardware video synth kit seen here last year has been incarnated as a Cellular Automata kit from the good folks of MAKE Magazine. MAKE has been nice enough to do the scary bits for you: the board is assembled and programmed, so all you have to do is make a nifty case. […]

It’s not digital music, but it doesn’t matter. It begs the question, do you have time in your day for beauty? Does your audience? (And that beauty might be made with a violin or a laptop, but either way — the question is time and attention.) Also, hint to Joshua Bell: ditch DC and come […]