Propellerhead today unveils the new Reason, incorporating Record functionality in both the full-blown and “Essentials” versions, a new audio interface in their first-ever hardware, and a beta that will at last make ReCycle a modern Mac tool. Record added some wonderful stuff to Reason, including a terrific analog-style console, modeled EQ and dynamics, the ability […]

If you aren’t quite ready to delve into the mysteries of granular synthesis and code, a colorful interface guides you through playing in Ableton Live. Granular synthesis… you’ve heard it before. Famously articulated by experimental composer Xenakis, the process of slicing up sound into tiny bits and reassembling it has produced everything from lovely (or […]

He’s built an open-source, retro-tinged 8-bit sampler, “Where’s the Party At?” (I’m been building the second generation now, so expect a review by early August.) He’s had electronic instrument designs on shelves at the retail chain Target and on the walls of the Whitney Art Museum in New York. He just completed a set of […]

It’s been caught in the shadow of (perhaps well-deserved) controversy over Final Cut Pro X, but Apple’s Motion is worth a look, whether or not you’re even a Final Cut user. (Final Cut Pro X is not required in order to buy Motion.) At $50, Motion gives you a range of dynamic animation behaviors, real-time […]

We’ve seen fairly impressive work involving people waving their arms around at cameras, but at the end of the day, you still have people … waving their arms around at cameras. In a refreshingly different take, the world of the game Mimicry is the “ultimate sandbox game” – set in a literal sandbox. Participants manipulate […]

This goes to ele—augh, no, aside from over-compressing, we need to stop overusing that joke. Photo (CC-BY) Orin Zebest. You’ve heard the gripes, and heard and seen the somewhat unscientific demos. Now it’s time to examine the over-compression of music with – science! Earl Vickers of STMicroelectronics examines the Loudness Wars in an academic paper, […]

From the intrepid grid-playing monome producers comes a whole bundle of goodness: a free album, and along with it, a nice video that illustrates what’s happening on some of the tracks, some reflections on how 15-second samples can bind together a community of music makers, and even, as a bonus, some tips on running Windows […]

Producer Sam Greene was so in love with Aalto, the semi-modular, Mac and Windows soft synth whose developer we profiled last month, that he made his own place to share patches for it. Patches are free to download and use in your music, and you can upload your own; the only restriction is that the […]

Hey, Jitter fans: jit.artkmulti is an external for Max/MSP and Jitter that brings the powerful, marker-based augmented reality capabilities of ARToolKit to Max. We’ve seen a lapse in interest in marker-based tracking, I think, with the advent of technologies like Kinect, but it’s still useful for certain applications – and this makes it really easy […]

Buckle up and project: that was the mission of a group of art “interventionists”, firing guerilla projections at the public installation of artist Sol LeWitt in Manhattan’s City Hall Park. The weapon of choice itself is one of interest: a self-powered mobile projection rig means live visuals can appear anywhere. The production team describes the […]