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Batteries and Suitcase Music: Chris Carter’s No-MIDI, No-Keyboard Musical Rig

How much can you do with a suitcase full of soundmakers? Quite a lot, as it happens. The 20th Century gave sound two great achievements. One was the successful modeling of filtering in digital software form. The other was the production of the electronic filter, first in quartz crystal form. Today, all of those advancements […]

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Brains, Computers, Focus: How Do You Stay Productively Creative?

The original pomodoro. Photo (CC-BY-SA) borgmarc. For an artist, being productive and being happy are often closely intertwined. Whether you’re polishing off an album, practicing your instrument, patching or coding a new musical tool, or managing your career, music requires immense levels of focus and discipline. Then there’s the matter of the stuff that tends […]

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Reality Check: You Don’t Need Any Phone for Music. It’s a Good Thing.

(CC-BY) Windell Oskay. Wanting something is different from needing something. And bending something to musical activities is different from requiring something for musical activities. Apple introduced a promising-looking update Monday to the iPhone. I didn’t really see much reason to talk about it, because there’s nothing specific in the update to music, even if it […]

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Android 2.2: Badly-needed Improvements to Audio, Touch, More; What’s Missing (UPDATED)

Yes, I admit it’s getting better. And that could mean more choices for creative music software makers. Photo (CC-BY) Pittaya Sroilong. Android 2.2 boasts enormous boosts to performance in Java, JavaScript, and the browser, plus nice end-user features like tethering and tons of developer goodies. But developers interested in pushing the multimedia capabilities of the […]

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And Just Like That, WebM, Vorbis, and VP8 Became Real Open Video Standards

What happened to the Internet standards advocates who got everything they ever wanted? They lived happily ever afte— now, wait a minute. Microsoft, Apple – you guys better not play the Grinch on this one, ‘kay? Photo (CC-BY) love♡janine. Shifts in standards usually take place at a glacial pace. This one may have just happened […]

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BBQ Chicken Ambiences, and Ten Other Inspiring Sound Design Stories

Whether your trade in audio is in soundtracks for screens and games, or you’re just exploring strange, new worlds and seeking out new life and new timbres in your music, the discipline of sound design is as rich and deep as cooking. It’s something you can do every day. Okay, now just put that “cooking” […]

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Real Sound Synthesis, Now in the Browser; Possible New Standard?

Bloop HTML5 Instrument inspired by Brian Eno’s Bloom from Bocoup on Vimeo. HTML5 and Javascript Synthesizer from Corban Brook on Vimeo. Pioneers like Max Mathews’ Bell Labs team taught the computer to hum, sing, and speak, before even the development of primitive graphical user interfaces. So it’s fitting that the standards that chart the Web’s […]

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Updated: MPEG LA Pool Planning to Torpedo OGG Theora, Says Jobs

RichardL notes some potentially major news this afternoon. Shortly after my post, Steve Jobs himself reportedly answered an open letter written by free software advocate Hugo Roy. Hugo’s letter contained suggestions about whether a standardized unencumbered video codec needed to accompany the video tag in order to be truly “open.” The original post, on “hugo’s […]

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