It’s good to get out of your studio now and then, as Chris Stack does here, hauling a few instruments (including the Minimoog) our for a live gig. Photo courtesy the artist. It’s a collision between a twenty-first century tablet and some of the most iconic analog instruments ever produced. It’s MIDI and digital meeting […]

Big or small, talk to many music gear makers, and you’ll find they’re in the business largely for love. But it’s still amazing just how many gear makers choose to go it alone. They build equipment in their flats and garages, hand-packing their creations and shipping it to a world of fellow musicians. Koma Electronik […]

What if film, rather than being projected from start to finish and proceeding in a straight line, could be reconstructed and performed? Every live visual performance involving video has more or less asked that question. But not every performance tries to convey a narrative in the process. Toni Dove’s Spectropia, coming this weekend to the […]

What if film, rather than being projected from start to finish and proceeding in a straight line, could be reconstructed and performed? Every live visual performance involving video has more or less asked that question. But not every performance tries to convey a narrative in the process. Toni Dove’s Spectropia, coming this weekend to the […]

Koma’s stuff is good. Really good. So good, you might even want to watch a hands-on video where I’m juggling a camera in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Their stompable, playable analog effects show well even in the back of a van circling Musikmesse. How I came to see this […]

Here’s a terrific vintage Apple II ad – one that might inspire some readers of this site to go eBay an Apple II for their next VJ gig. (Hey, it has analog video out built in, something a modern Apple … doesn’t.) Of course, what’s telling is that when this ad was made, in 1977, […]

Could a piece of software make you think differently about sound? Could it reflect ideas, the culture of listening? The developers of the SUFI series of plug-ins seem to think so. In place of screencasts showing which knob to turn which way, they head with a video crew to Morocco. The “instruction” might be about […]

Something like this could be the guts of your next digital musical instrument – and it might even mean leaving your laptop at home for the next gig. Photo (CC-BY) Koen Kooi. Mobile computing has already had an enormous impact on music making. A modern phone or tablet (and yes, most often, these come from […]

Like an animated equivalent of the Transporter on Star Trek, depth-sensing cameras and custom code can transform the human body into 22,000 points, then back again into something our mind again imagines as flesh and alive, even in abstraction. In “unnamed soundsculpture,” by Cedric Kiefer (onformative) and Daniel Franke (wearechopchop), the body takes on a […]

From top, MIDIWriter uses what would normally be your text input for music; MIDI Studio takes a more conventional – but nicely-implemented – approach. Equipped with MIDI, a phone or tablet can communicate with a vast range of standalone hardware and computer software for music. So, what to do with that power? Two recent applications […]