Tai Chi / 5 Video Artworks / Framed Gallery, Tokyo from Universal Everything on Vimeo. Universal Everything is a design shop that continues as a standard bearer for expressive digital forms, a high water mark in electronic expression. Founded by the UK’s Matt Pyke, the creative team now spans England and Holland. From top, two […]

Ableton today has revealed the details of Live 9, alongside new hardware called Push. The software update brings new ways of transforming sound into MIDI, new and improved devices for shaping sounds, tools for automation that work inside clips and with curved interpolation, a new Browser, and a number of interface and usability enhancements. There […]

Now, Ableton is doing its own hardware. Sure, Ableton’s logo was on the Akai APC40 and Novation Launchpad, and yes, “engineering by Akai” is stamped on the Push. But make no mistake: this is really the first Ableton hardware, and it shows. Push is a grid controller with extra keys and encoders for navigating features. […]

As many ponder the fate of hardware mixing, mixing in software continues to advance. And in a reminder of just how many different applications video mixing can have, here’s a fascinating article about a new open-source Linux-based video mixing tool called Snowmix: Copenhagen Suborbitals Release Snowmix, an Open Source Video Mixer [The Power Base] What’s […]

You can dream of something, you can complain about it on forums, or you can do it. Sneak-Thief, aka Michel Morin, is a doer. And what’s great about him is that he doesn’t just produce geeky, obsessive hardware – he has the musical chops to match. He can wrangle his own hardware, coding in C, […]

It sounds like the computer system on a Bird of Prey on Star Trek, but Kling-Net is at the heart of where VJ and media server maker ArKaos – and a lot of the live visual world – is headed. Forget the phrase “projection mapping,” and think “video mapping” and “pixel mapping.” Yes, projectors will […]

He’s been called the father of disco. He has Oscars for Top Gun, Flashdance, and Midnight Express. (Impressive with or without Oscars.) And he scored the epic of 80s youth childhood, The Never-Ending Story – and the original Battlestar Galactica. He’s worked with Bowie, and Freddy Mercury, and Blondie. He’s a pioneer in composing for […]

At the Metropolitan Opera in New York, high in the rafters, there’s a set of unusually-cheap seats called the Score Desk section. There, in addition to the seating, panels of wood are oversized enough to accommodate full-orchestral scores. While leaning over the railing to see the performance (the section is not for those with fear […]

Sometimes, it can be quicker and more expressive to simply patch together what you want from basic building blocks, rather than wrangle with something built for a specific purpose. And that explains the ongoing appeal of modular software environments. Audulus is an elegant, efficient modular environment on the Mac. It’s not as deep or broad […]

In this corner, the computer: dynamic, networked. In this corner, the trained human musician: still, in fact, very much able to read scores. Combining those two technologies – human and machine – has been surprisingly limited. That’s why OSCNotation, while a very simple app, is an intriguing glimpse into the future of the score. Normally, […]