Come on – you know that occasionally you want technology to respond when you slap it. As my sister watched an episode of the television show Quantum Leap, I thoroughly enjoyed watch Dean Stockwell’s character Al give his pocket computer, looking for all the world like a 7″ tablet, little helpful smacks. SmackTop does that […]

The weather outside is frightful, but the hi-fi is so delightful. Let it snow. Photo (CC-BY) Junichiro AOYAMA, Kyoto. From Berlin’s Melissa Taylor and Tailored Communication, for my money, just about the best publicist for electronic music out there, we get one epic playlist. If you’re lucky enough to get one holiday or another (Christmas? […]

Christmas in Cork, at – where else – McDonald’s. Photo (CC-BY-SA) jf1234. If you can find a spot in the rotation with your Mannheim Steamroller collection for something a bit different, CDM reader Leigh Walsh of Cork, Ireland sends in her work. She describes it as “punky gothy electronic … for Christmas,” with any proceeds […]

Image: Jason Hickey. As Christmas revelers head out for last-minute shopping in the last surge of pre-holiday capitalism, they might catch over piped music the ouvre of one Mannheim Steamroller. For all the electronic artists we might imagine as representing the genre, this guy has sold one heck of a lot of Christmas records, in […]

Have an uncommon yule with tools and music from the Commons. That’s the pitch (so to speak) of the Ultimate Christmas Songbook, an iPad app built with 50 Christmas songs and a fully free and open source notation engine. Making use of public domain songs, the number of songs available continues to grow as the […]

If you’re already in holiday mode, sapped by the shortest day of the year (at least if you’re in the Northern Hemisphere), and looking to kick back with some audiovisual stimulation, this should do the trick. (I know it appeals to me, after 15 hours crossing the Atlantic yesterday.) The radio show Solid Steel regularly […]

Music lovers are hacking Apple’s Siri voice recognition technology. By connecting to some of the “intelligence” of the cloud, these tools can make your phone rap or send music files to a player piano for instant musical playback. First up: Yamaha’s piano taking requests, thanks to music grabbed online. A Yamaha rep explains: Yamaha consultant […]

Consumption, or creation? When it comes to notation and musical scores, the iPad (and tablets, generally) has fallen on the side of reading rather than writing, display rather than creation. Notion for iPad, a mobile version of the desktop notation software, looks poised to change all of that. See video, above, for an overview of […]

VIDEO-SL is the video plug-in for Serato’s Scratch Live, extending the turntablist / virtual vinyl metaphor from sound to the realm of video. Once loaded, you can manage video clips and control them with vinyl or CD as if they lived on records, a clever rendition of something that would technically be impossible (or at […]

VIDEO-SL is the video plug-in for Serato’s Scratch Live, extending the turntablist / virtual vinyl metaphor from sound to the realm of video. Once loaded, you can manage video clips and control them with vinyl or CD as if they lived on records, a clever rendition of something that would technically be impossible (or at […]