King of the jungle, as seen at the British Museum. Photo (CC-BY-ND) wootang01/mckln (Uninteresting side note – I happened to be at this location yesterday.) It’s become something of a tradition here on CDM. Apple releases new OS. Music developers – one or more – release notes that suggest you might want to wait to […]

Composing with rules instead of playing notes directly, composer Richard Garrett has built a series of generative, algorithmic, ambient note makers and processors in Ableton Live and the Max for Live add-on. (And yes, user-generated content continues to be a rationale for why many people would purchase Max for Live in addition to Live itself.) […]

At bottom, a strobe and high-speed camera accurately represent the way in which a string is moving. At top, a video taken with an iPhone camera distorts your sense of how the string is moving by capturing instead images of standing waves, caused by the rolling shutter on the device. The video isn’t wrong – […]

sktch is a different kind of art tool for the mobile app age. For starters, it’s the outgrowth of a media outlet: Creative Applications Network, led by London-based architect, technologist, and curator Filip Visnjic, has already become the go-to site for people interested in making apps into art. The application itself embodies some of that […]

Ed. Twisted Tools are a special breed of music software makers, concocting wild-sounding instruments, sequencers, and effects, all with a distinctively-colorful and graphical approach to interface design. And they do all of this in Reaktor, Native Instruments’ deep toolbox for visual development of soundmakers, a patching cousin to tools like Max/MSP, Pd, and Plogue Bidule. […]

It’s easy to forget that some of the simple joys of electronic music are foreign to many lay people. Odds are, if you read this site, you’re an intelligent and well-informed digital musician. (I don’t mean to stroke my own ego, either; because so many of you are intelligent and well-informed digital musicians, you send […]

Novacut, via a Kickstarter campaign gone viral, promises real-time collaborative video editing from an open source tool. Open source video editing itself has been a long-unfulfilled dream; software from Blender to kdenlive can do editing in theory, but it’s hardly a seamless experience for an editor experienced in the proprietary competition. At the same time, […]

The Glitch Mob is one of the hot summer tickets for electronic music, and they’re fortunate enough to stage a massive live visual spectacle alongside the show. This week’s a perfect time to consider all that visual goodness, with the release of their latest original music, “We Can Make the World Stop” on EP. So […]

Cycling ’74 this week has announced an upcoming new version of its Max software, the DIY patching software for multimedia, from live sound and music to visuals. It looks as though more details will be available in the fall, but we at least get a glimpse of the goals for Max 6, as well as […]

Let’s be completely clear: pop over to the Mac App Store right now, and in addition to grabbing Final Cut Pro X for $300, you can pick up, a la carte, either Motion or Compressor. Whereas for a time Apple required the purchase of Final Cut Studio to get the companion apps, you can now […]