Don’t fret. An iPad can open up new ways of touching musical ideas. What if you could touch sound more directly, using sophisticated sensing to play between most common notes – even with hundreds of levels of microtonal pitch? Cantor lets you do just that – and it’s here now, proving that Apple will indeed […]

For creative coders, OpenFrameworks has been a godsend, taking the gnarly power of C++ and making it accessible to artists and designers, some of whom might never have touched code. It’s unlocking a lot of the amazing work we see, from interactive design to Kinect hacks. (See Gallery, above. This week, OpenFrameworks added a 0071 […]

I’ve had a lot of conversations lately that run something like this: free and open source tools shouldn’t just be shown for the sake of it. They should be better – demonstrably so. Here’s the funny thing: free software advocates are often the people nodding in agreement. And in some cases, they can blow your […]

Behind this tech are some essential building blocks. And the vendor of one of those, a key component in the touchscreen, has some news next week. Photo (CC-BY) Ken Hawkins. Let’s do some quick math: put together the first maker of a consumer multi-touch product (also the first real multi-touch music product), and one of […]

Hey, why the heck not? (CC-BY-SA) farnea. Imagine connecting to MIDI gadgets – inputs and outputs – and sequencing musical patterns from a browser. (As a developer, imagine doing that from JavaScript. As a user, imagine doing that right inside your browser window with a music app.) For now, such things exist only on a […]

In their lonely, intimate single “Pillatu,” the Chile-based duo of Vicente Espinoza and Alfredo Duarte offer some haunting music-making. Entitled El Gato, la Virgen & el Diablo (“the cat, the virgin, and the devil”), the artists are also making a kind of multimedia presentation of the work. Thanks to these CDM readers for sending in […]

Synths meet monkeys. Photo: Andreas Tilliander. Composer and Swedish dance music maestro Håkan Libdo has been a constant source of experimentation. But his latest project yields zoo-like new adventurousness. Six species of monkeys are equipped with synthesizers to test the question of whether playing a synth is really playing music – or if it’s so […]

Features come and features go. As upgrades go, Traktor 2.5 has plenty to recommend it – plus, it’s free for current Traktor 2 users, meaning you probably don’t need anyone’s advice to try it out. So, then, the question is: will tools mean that the DJ gigs you hear be any different? There’s nothing wrong […]

This may sum up how I feel about this project. It almost certainly embodies how composer Jim Guthrie must have felt, as a who’s who of Japanese game music takes on his work. Photo (of the Tokyo Game Show, natch) (CC-BY) kanegen. Sword & Sworcery, the iPad album-as-game, has gotten plenty of love from this […]

We hear you: amidst the various music doodling tools calibrated for casual taps on a phone screen, you want something you can actually make your own with your own sounds. Here’s one example of that: triqtraq. It’s got the “tap it on the bus to improvise a pattern” feel of some of the apps we’ve […]