What could audiovisual art made for tablets look like? Some dismiss the results as “toys.” The creators of Thicket embrace that very role. Thicket, the product of electronic A/V artists Morgan Packard and Joshue Ott, is intended as a kind of immersive distraction, filling the screen of an Apple handheld or iPad with clouds of […]

The modular MIDI step sequencer for Mac, Numerology 3, gets a big update today, adding humanization, generative patterns, and an enhanced UI and functionality. That makes this a more powerful laboratory than ever for creating new musical patterns. There’s also now a budget “Standard” edition and more advanced “Pro” version, AU support for use as […]

Trinity Audio Group and creative director Ronald Stewart have pushed the idea of a mobile music tablet since around 2005. I first saw what they were working on in the summer of 2006, as they readied a dedicated mobile DAW. But, at least from my vantage point, it’s really taken until now for some of […]

HC Gilje’s “conversations with spaces” research and work is an effort to blur the line between digital imagery and the surfaces on which it’s projected. But rather than just make this a solo endeavor, HC shares his Max/MSP-Jitter-based tools for Mac and Windows with the larger community, free. Using the model of sources, layers, mixers, […]

Here’s an early Christmas present for Mac and Windows synth lovers: Native Instruments is giving away a simplified version of its Prism instrument for Reaktor as a free (as in beer), self-contained synth. You’ll get access to Prism’s lovely “modal bank” synthesis method, which creates some unusual, shimmering timbres. (In fact, having a simpler version […]

Audiovisual technology has returned to spectacle. Artists are armed with new technologies for fusing space and image, sound and sight. What they tend not to have is permanent spaces. And that lack of venues has made audiovisual artists nomadic and provisional, constrained to hastily-provisioned, rectangular, sometimes dim projections. In short, for revolutions to happen, you […]

With takes on the Vince Guaraldi Trio and Tchaikovsky, the sound-slicing members of the monome community have turned their button-encrusted devices to spreading holiday cheer to you, for free. A new, CC-licensed album is available for download. (One caution: CC licenses don’t cover sample clearance for works sampled on these albums, so beware.) They wouldn’t […]

If you could only pack one controller in your backpack, and weight, size, and cost were at an absolute premium, the Akai MPK mini would be tough to beat. The latest salvo in the ultra-compact controller wars, Akai has taken the keyboard, pad controllers, and encoders from its LPK25 and LPD8 and packed them into […]

Human beings remain impressive organic technology; we’re gifted with extraordinary abilities to detect tiny variations in facial expression. But that minor miracle of perception can be an animator’s nightmare, once you edge into the realm of attempted realism. The key is to reach the other side of the so-called “uncanny valley.” Perhaps even more impressive […]

For years, anyone with doubts that soft synths had become commodity needed only to look to Crystal. Not only is this proprietary synth completely free-as-in-beer for Windows and Mac, but it could easily be your only synth if you so desired. Crystal is a semi-modular instrument with the usual trimmings – subtractive and FM synthesis, […]