They are the robots: Flight of the Conchords. Now, you are the robots, too, as Rock Band Network opens the indie floodgates to the music-distribution-as-game model. (And yes, you’ll get to sing along with the Conchords, too.) Photo (CC-BY-SA) kris krüg. Music games Rock Band and Guitar Hero are simple enough in terms of gameplay, […]

What can you do with this? Game designers and artists find out this week at GDC. (Pictured: my own submission, up close.) Why should Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion (and, well, their editor) go to a game conference? This year, in particular, the annual gathering of game developers in San Francisco means a […]

Connecting stuff is one of the things musicians naturally do with gear. So, there’s really no reason that musical gear shouldn’t network as easily as Web servers. And yet a basic protocol, built largely on existing standards, meets with responses like this: “We’ll support OSC when there’s hardware out there.” “Name one piece of hardware […]

We got to once again enjoy the work of Beeple aka Mike Winkelmann this week with his Instrument Video Nine, featuring a new batch of 3D sound-making robots. The work landed him on the top of Vimeo, and rightfully so. Mike now shares some of his work flow All the (wonderful, hand-rawn) pictures by Mike […]

“It looks alien at first, it looks scary … [but] it’s like, here’s your paper; be creative.” “A tracker basically turns your computer an instrument.” -Dac Chartrand, Renoise, trying to explain Renoise to those who haven’t yet gotten religion Renoise 2.5 is here, for real – not a beta, a nice, golden, final release. The […]

Sewing together music: designer and techno-textile artist Lara Grant constructs music with a modded sewing machine and Max. Lara is one of the artists playing Handmade Music in New York next week; stay tuned here for more behind the scenes of what those folks are doing. Photo (CC-BY-SA) See-ming Lee. Before evolutionary adaptation comes mutation. […]

You’ve found a cool effect. It makes use of your GPU. Why shouldn’t it work in more than one place? And why shouldn’t you be able to easily port standard-format effects in code-for-artists environments like OpenFrameworks and Processing? With a new plug-in pack and further progress on development, FreeFrameGL promises finally to deliver on just […]

Hey, everyone! Look, there’s a new video from Beeple! instrumental video nine from beeple on Vimeo. Now, some background: We’ve been following the awesome Beeple, AKA Mike Winkelmann, since back in the day. He even gave an interview to Momo about his techniques in FL Studio, Vegas and After Effects. This new piece continues the […]

Artist and design Yoshi Akai (no relation, as far as I know) treats analog electronics as an art form, a sculpture, an instrument, and an exercise in interaction design, all wrapped in the velour of vintage hardware design. For everyone who misses the deco elegance of meticulously-engraved surfaces and tastefully-appointed enclosures of early-century electronics, Yoshi’s […]

Our Zygote Interactive Balls at the Olympics from Alex Beim on Vimeo. I’m such a terrible blogger. Here are giant, glowing balls, and I can’t think of a cheeky, snarky, tasteless way to describe them. (Heck, I don’t even know of anything to do with those inflatable beavers at the Olympics.) Happily, the balls themselves […]