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Free How-to on Circuit-Bending the Saw Vocal Recorder; Handmade Music Austin Sunday

“Your kids will love this Saw figure.” So, too, must have been the calculation of the person who decided to immortalize the film Saw with little toys and figures containing 30 seconds of voice recording, because this toy is now available in quantity for — wait for it — US$2. A $2, 30-second sampler? Now […]

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Vocalize: Vocoder for iOS, Open Source Pitch Correction for Android, Plug-ins

VirSyn have announced one of the nicest effects I’ve seen yet on a mobile platform in the form of iVoxel, a vocoder for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. On the handhelds, it looks like something you could easily hold up to your mouth and rest atop a synth; on iPad, you get a nicely-sized touchable keyboard […]

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A New Reaktor in Public Beta; First Look and Sweet Lazerbass Sounds

Reaktor 5.5’s refreshed interface. Click for a full-sized image. Reaktor 5.5, the software that’s both a giant bundle of out-there effects and synths and a visual development environment for making your own creations, has entered public beta. Despite the “point-five” appended to the name, it’s a major, new release, with new sound modules, streamlined multi-pane […]

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Hypnotic Colored Geometries and Balloon AV from SWEATSHOPPE

SWEATSHOPPE-Whip It from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo. Visuals and audio frequently cohabitate, but assembling truly integrated audiovisual artistry remains a nascent field. When done right, it’s terribly satisfying. We saw SWEATSHOPPE’s Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy painting “graffiti” with video projection last year. They’ve been doing some other fantastic work since. At top, Whip It is […]

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Inventive Wit of Spy Films, Proof Commercial Work Can Aid Art

Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo. Making Of Nuit Blanche from Spy Films on Vimeo. Surrealist René Magritte had the best academic training, but his early works are viewed by scholars as being derivative – and you probably haven’t ever seen them. It seems that his work after the academy, as a commercial sign […]

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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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