There’s a reason for Processing’s popularity. By making code simple, elegant, and direct, and catering directly to the kinds of visual ideas creative people have, the environment has made programming accessible to artists and designers in a way nothing else could. Coding no longer has to be a source of fear, or a bad word. […]

“Dance music” is a term that has lately become maligned all over again. And the press is often fond of deriding the music of machines, as if drum machines and computers are sentient alien technology that climbed out of the smoldering remains of a wrecked UFO rather than the handiwork of someone’s imagination. For me, […]

Perhaps part of what you need for laptop music to evolve into an appreciated live performance art medium is simply time. Finnish artist Sasu Ripatti is a good candidate for mastery of the form. Honing his production and performance skills since the late 90s, he’s become a maestro of digital music. Moments in his music […]

Ivory tower, let down your hair. Make no mistake. The slightly-impossible-to-pronounce acronym CCRMA (“karma”), standing for the not-terribly-sexy “Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics,” is one of the world’s hotbeds for innovation in electronic music. From the lowest-level DSP code to the craziest live performances, this northern California research center nesting at Stanford […]

Standuino π [pi] synced with frauAngelico + microGranny from standuino on Vimeo. Once the stuff of noise art oddity — isolated electronic experiments staying mostly on the test table — the DIY instrument is starting to find friends and form ensembles. And so it is that Czech instrument design mad scientists Standuino have assembled a […]

4 ways to sync VDMX and Ableton Live from Studio Rewind on Vimeo. Frequently asked question? Maybe incessantly-asked question. Live performers simply want a way to have more intimate relationships between music and visuals onstage. That means whether they’re working solo or with a live visualist, being able to get useful signal between music and […]

Website Visitors Like most website operators, Create Digital Media collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Create Digital Media’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how […]

Call it laser mapping. Melbourne-based artist Jayson Haebich has rendered in thin air, literally, architectural forms in color. He uses custom software to map lasers through particles to produce an ephemeral sculpture of air. The results are gorgeous – frozen digital motion. From his description: These are a series of static light sculptures that have […]

Out today, Arpeggionome is the iPhone follow-up to an iPad grid instrument, making lovely, elegant cascades of notes from a screen full of circles. The work of San Francisco-based electrical engineer Alexander Randon, it’s especially nice to see not just the app itself, but the music the developer makes with his own tool. Watch the […]

Take your visual app. Take a parameter. Now control it with timelines and automation – anything, anywhere. The appeal is clear for visualists, particularly with built-in options sometimes limited. Now, sequencing control – clocked to MIDI – can take on powerful new dimensions. Vezér isn’t the first app to go this direction, by any means. […]