Now that tablets and phones have the computational power our main studio machines did just a few short years ago, there’s every reason to look to these gizmos for music. For a person patching in Pure Data (Pd), the free graphical sound environment, it means you can liberate the stuff you’re making from your computer […]

As we trace the spread of audiovisual culture and architectural mapping practice, here’s the latest episode. Weimar is planning the second edition of their projection=centric digital media festival Genius Loci Weimar. There, in the land of Liszt and the country of Goethe, they reimagine the city’s landscape in light and sound. The centerpiece of the […]

They’ll modulate you when you’re at the breakfast table / They’ll modulate you when you are young and able / But I would not feel so all alone / Everybody must get … modulated. Wow, that didn’t work at all. (Apologies,

Swiping through clouds of timbre and melody, using Gestrument is an experience of a different musical animal. Jesper Nordin and Kymatica / Jonatan Liljedahl created the iPad version, available now for ten bucks. But it’s worth looking at that side by side with Gestrument for Kinect, as the same metaphors can translate across input methods. […]

Dripping with vividly-acidic synthetic analog textures that wash in and out of shot footage, the new music video for Maryland, USA artist Maxmillon Dunbar is a dreamy reverie of light and image. It’s a bath in color, swept up in the warm glow of the single “Loving the Drift.” Brooklyn-based, DC-born artist Aurora Halal is […]

Dripping with vividly-acidic synthetic analog textures that wash in and out of shot footage, the new music video for Maryland, USA artist Maxmillon Dunbar is a dreamy reverie of light and image. It’s a bath in color, swept up in the warm glow of the single “Loving the Drift.” Brooklyn-based, DC-born artist Aurora Halal is […]

microGranny – pocket-sized handmade granular sampler from standuino on Vimeo. The Czech team of Standuino have been cooking up lots of wonderfully-geeky sonic electronics lately, but the latest might be my favorite. microGranny reads samples from a microSD card (hello, field recorder), and crunches them into granular bits. It’s the musical equivalent of one of […]

When music moved from live venues to radios and recordings, artists had to find a way to respond. Now, labels struggle to be heard in the era of Spotify and streaming, always-on, always-overabundant media. We could talk grander themes, but the possibilities of this conflict are most vivid in a microcosm. Call it post-digital or […]

The problem with the music instrument industry releasing all their new stuff at the same time – as they do annually at the USA’s NAMM trade show – is that useful but not-particularly-sexy stuff can easily get lost. So, here’s one example that I think a number of pianists and keyboardists wanting mobile keyboards might […]

Don’t call it “lo-fi.” Call it “rad-fi.” At least, that’s what Austin, Texas-based creator Dr. Bleep says about his latest, the Bleep Drum. We saw the Stone’s Throw Records / Dam-Funk commission Dam-Drum 2.0 last month, but it sold out almost as soon as we mentioned it. The Bleep Drum is a sibling to that […]