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 […]
Music
Liz Pelly’s Spotify book reveals how company uses ghost content
Music Tech Web December 19, 2024
Inside the Dune 2 score with Osmose and Hans Zimmer
Gear Music Music tech Stories Tech December 11, 2024
Adobe Defends Intel-Only Mac Release for Soundbooth
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 […]
DIY MIDI Drum Triggers with Arduino; MIDI Over USB?
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 […]
Dynamic Visual Synthesis: Quartz Composer Meets KAOSS Pad, Game Controller, Music Video
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 […]
Good Times for Graphics Cards; ATI Ships X1650 and Deals Keep Coming
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 […]
An Orchestra of Twelve Circuit-Bent Pikachus
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 […]
Soundcells, a Homebrew Nintendo DS “Ukelele”
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 […]
Buildings as Musical Instruments: Chicago’s Whistling Cabrini-Green in Ruins
The excellent architectural resource BLDGBLOG reports that the ruined husk of the recently-demolished Cabrini-Green in Chicago has been transformed into an eerie wind instrument of sorts. Geoff Manaugh writes about the image we see here: The old tower blocks of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, transformed by demolition into totem pole-like wind instruments, flute-ruins, a musically-active wasteland whistling […]
New Film Scoring Site; Mac mini, PC Sampler Farms for Samples
The music technology blogosophere continues to expand, now with an excellent new site dedicated to film scoring. The site also has a bonus: its name begins with the word “Create”, which means it can join CDM’s unofficial “Create [Stuff]” network! Create Film Scores Jerome Leroy, an L.A.-based music systems technician, is editing the new site. […]
Weekend Physical Computing DIY: Strip an Inkjet Printer for Parts
Since receiving my Arduino I’ve found myself looking at technology a little differently. As your post-production skills increase you tend to watch videos thinking: “I could do that”, or “I could do that if someone gave me lots of money and got out of my way”. In my post-Arduino life I now look at technology and […]