Photo (CC-BY) Mark Anderson. The generation of people who defined modern computing seems to be passing this year. Following Max Mathews, another Bell Labs titan is lost to us: Dennis Ritchie is the man who created the original C programming language (again at Bell Labs) as well as co-developed the UNIX operating system. President Obama […]

Light-up grids of buttons are nearly commonplace, but the BlipBox is something different: its array of lights is also a sensor, making it both X/Y controller and light-up grid. And it’s designed to be completely open — firmware, hardware, schematics and documentation are all fully GPL-licensed and open source. For those of us who aren’t […]

It had to happen — button triggering, as popularized by the monome, here meets a conventional two-channel DJ mixer. But the layout I must say is quite spare and lovely, the work of the Japanese-based PICnome project. Furthermore, it’s Open Source Hardware, covered as I have recommended by a ShareAlike Creative Commons license (with no […]

Deceptikon morphs into Dkon — and talks to us about doing more with less. Photo courtesy the artist. Artist Zack Wright, for a handful of followers of what we used to call IDM, will be a blast from the past. Recording as Deceptikon on labels like Merck and Daly City Records, Zack is back. His […]

This update I believe is worth a second post, as it makes visible the otherwise-mysterious algorithms producing music in our previous post. And yes, I believe this is “music,” naysayers aside. Whether it’s good music is in the ears of the listener, but if you can describe this much sound with this little code, imagine […]

On Create Digital Music today, we cover stunningly-complex, if aesthetically very digital, compositions compacted into single lines of C code: Entire Musical Compositions Made from Just One Line of Code are Glitchy but Musical It’s in the grand tradition of communities like the demoscene, but features algorithmic invention that has lots of people excited. Friend-of-the-site […]

Montreal-based Damian Taylor, music director and engineer for Björk, is the subject of an epic interview on cycling74.com, spanning music, life in Montreal, working with Björk and what makes her special, and what patching in Max/MSP can mean compositionally and creatively. Damian has some especially nice reflections on what having an open-ended music environment can […]

Touch on devices like the iPad is functional, but limited in its expression – there’s no pressure or tactile feedback. That’s why we’ve enthusiastically followed Randy Jones’ “continuous capacitive sensing” technology on the Soundplane for some time. Sensing pressure, it behaves more like an acoustic instrument might – that is, if such an acoustic instrument […]

Photo (CC-BY) Mo Riza. Thoughts on Steve Jobs’ departure on Create Digital Music: Bicycles for the Mind See also my thoughts from August – for anyone concerned for the future of Apple, I still believe that leaving behind a company that can go on in his absence may be Jobs’ latest accomplishment as a leader. […]

Just before I got the news tonight, I was riding a newly-purchased bicycle over Berlin’s Eisenbrücke, and thinking again about the way Steve Jobs described the computer – as a bicycle for the mind. It was something about feeling effortless speed, all from something that needs no fuel, that made it hit me. I can […]