Virtual patching has reached a major milestone: you don’t need a controller. Using just your hands and natural gestures, you can now build up entire interactive worlds, connect virtual wires, tweak knobs and faders, and play virtual instruments in PatchWorld on Meta Quest. Combined with Mixed Reality, virtual physics, and support for OpenSoundControl and Ableton Live and Link integration, it’s a glimpse of how mixed reality and VR can work for music making.

Stochastic Instruments has a preview of some tasty generative sequencer modules. Random walks meet music theory, and what you get is Melodic Contour Sequencing, navigated with knobs, voltage, and (on the larger module) a joystick.

Eventide is in on the holiday gift game, too, with a giveaway through New Year’s Eve of one-knob signal separation fixers for low-end thump and high-end air.

Augmented Mallets Play, showing graphics of mallet instruments (one real, one synthetic), and parameter knobs arrayed around a central morph knob.

Harper’s Magazine has an excerpt from Liz Pelly’s book on Spotify, and already we get another bombshell. The company conspired to farm out ghost content, often substituting for known artists, to pay out less to artists. That much was suspected by anyone listening to the platform, but the details are even more damning and far-reaching than you might imagine.

Living Labyrinth immerses you in the world of Danish composer SØS Gunver Ryberg’s music. It’s a spatial experience of a flowing organic dream world of deep listening and meditative interconnectedness. And it includes both unreleased bits and portions of SPINE, one of the more notable releases of this year.

Oneiroi from Befaco is a mythical variety chocolate box where every flavor is delicious. It’s an experimental slash drone slash sound design treasure box. And now it’s in VCV Rack.

Like something out of a (nerdy) magician’s library, Build Your Own Modular is a physical, ring-bound book that transforms into a complete Eurorack modular system. It’s both a printed instructional document and the thing you’re building — all in one.

Out: tiny milk chocolates. In: delicious Program Card code creations for the Music Thing Computer in the Workshop System. It’s a beautiful story of what happens when a small, focused community goes all in on an idea.

Modeled resonators, formants, waveshapers, filters, delays, all with extensive modulation: Synestia takes the unparalleled sonic shapers from creator Brian Clevinger’s Plasmonic and brings it to any input signal.