Aside from commercial alternatives, the preferred open source audio editor tool is Audacity. Early releases of Audacity were unquestionably rough around the edges, in terms of both stability and features, but thanks to the efforts of the open source community, the software is steadily improving. Version 1.2.5, released this week, is the new stable version, […]

Firmly in the “start ’em young” category, the TSI (Teething ring Sound Instrument) is designed to allow 0-3 year olds to create digital music in Max/MSP. Pressure from the baby’s mouth suckling at the teething ring is converted to MIDI messages and sent to a sound patch on a connected computer: Pitch corresponds to the […]

I’ve resisted the temptation to join the chorus of blogs posting endless Halloween posts, but if Halloween is about scary, fringe, clear-the-party tunes that drive people from your speakers, then I think we can make every day Halloween around here. Enter Calling All Fiends, an eclectic collection of really strange tracks “with the power to […]

This year’s Macworld, due to hit San Francisco in January, is shaping up to be an epic event for visuals and motion graphics. True, Macworlds of late have paled in comparison to the heyday of the conferenece, but this year looks extraordinary, especially if you’re interested in motion graphics and visuals, especially since there’s a […]

Adobe seems to have baffled the Mac community by announcing that its upcoming audio utility Soundbooth, profiled here earlier this week, would run on Intel Macs but not PowerPC Macs. MacInTouch immediately cried foul, and suddenly the Mac world, having spent the past year yelling at Adobe for not releasing Intel-native code, has begun yelling […]

The Arduino I/O board is becoming the board of choice for building DIY electronics projects cheaply and easily. It’s affordable, it’s flexible, it’s open source (and has a growing community to help you out), and evolving nicely. Naturally, one of the first things we want to do with it is build some cool music electronics […]

Here’s a video roundup for you fans of Quartz Composer, the powerful, free live motion graphics synthesizer and developer tool on Mac OS X 10.4 and later. Korg KAOSS Pad 3s and game controllers prove again to be very cool controllers for visual performance. If you’re not a QC user, these will work well with […]

Gaming gurus can obsess all they want about things like vertex performance. What I see when I look at the video card lineup is that graphics cards right now are very, very cheap for the performance they deliver. With DirectX 10 just over the horizon but not yet here on Windows, the current generation of […]

Like a psychotic Muppephone for Nintendo lovers, the 12-Pikachu Orchestra is a performance instrument assembled from an unholy number of circuit-bent Pikachu toys. Found on the circuit bending authority GetLoFi, via flickr, though sadly there are no video or sound clips yet. If you can imagine this single Pikachu mayhem multiplied a dozen times, you […]

Homebrewers continue to dream up new ways of making music with mobile game systems. Sometimes the results are useful as actual tools, and sometimes they’re more of a fascinating novelty. In the latter category is the truly unusual Soundcells, a virtual “ukelele” inspired by the grid-based music interface of Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-On. The interface looks […]