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 […]

(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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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 […]

Cymatic ripple from flight404 on Vimeo. It’s a beautiful age emerging for people making art with code. Tools like Processing and OpenFrameworks are as much about a philosophy and way of life as a specific tool. They’re not only about free and open code, but lightweight syntax, pulling together libraries that make media “just work,” […]