Northwest Reef from Umcorps on Vimeo. Aside from being toy-like mini-computers, could mobile devices take on a musical usefulness all their own? At the Electronic Music Foundation’s 10th Anniversary Symposium in 2004, Morton Subotnik and fellow panelists imagined an iPod that, instead of playing canned music from your music library, would actually generate music for […]

Screen grab: John Biehler For those of you who are interested, Apple’s WWDC keynote has focused today on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone SDK. Macworld has a nice live blow-by-blow. Here’s the bottom line for me. First, Apple has done an incredible job of demonstrating the potential of rich media apps in general, mobile […]

Big Ideas (Don’t get any) from 1030 on Vimeo. In case you haven’t seen this, James Houston has produced a short film in which an assortment of old computer gear “plays” Radiohead’s “Nude.” We’ve seen various bicycle parts and such performing music around here, but not the actual components of computers in this way. James […]

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7 When I reviewed JazzMutant’s Lemur at the end of 2005 (printed in the February 2006 Keyboard Magazine), I wondered if what we were really waiting for wasn’t a computer screen. At the time, I wrote: There’s no question that multi-touch touchscreens represent the future of computer interfaces, and the Lemur […]

Generative visuals like these could take massive leaps forward in the near future, as enabling technologies clear the way for new techniques. Photo: Emi Maeda on harp and electronics, Lia on live generative visuals, (CC) by watz. The VJ and live visualist of the future isn’t just about DJ metaphors and what happens in clubs. […]

1893 Columbian Exposition, Chicago, and Vikings — basically a convergence of things I take geeky historical pleasure in. Reproduced from Stanley Applebaum’s The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, p. 51.  Snagged by Karla Kaulfuss, via Flickr. Daedelus remains one of my favorite electronic music personalities. A virtuoso of his hand-built Monome (the early prototype) dressed […]

We covered a source for cheap visualist miscellany last week. It included cheap NTSC CMOS cameras, but unfortunately DealExtreme doesn’t seem to stock much PAL gear. I had gone looking and placed an order with another site, but didn’t want to recommend it until that order had arrived intact. That order has arrived intact. The […]

Crystal Castles: now under fire for abusing a Creative Commons license on a chiptune track. Photo by Oliver J. Lopena: oliverlopena.com. (And CC-licensed, via Flickr.) As using sounds produced on unusual 8-bit systems and game consoles grows in popularity, some artists are appropriating the music as their own. Sometimes, as with Beck, a well-known or […]

Scratching began as a practical means by which DJs could cue records. (So say originators like Grandmaster Flash; if you’re interested in the history, check out the fantastic documentary Scratch — trailer above.) But something about the gesture, the mechanical feeling of scratching, and all that history has made the turntable compelling as a controller. […]