What happened to the Internet standards advocates who got everything they ever wanted? They lived happily ever afte— now, wait a minute. Microsoft, Apple – you guys better not play the Grinch on this one, ‘kay? Photo (CC-BY) love♡janine. Shifts in standards usually take place at a glacial pace. This one may have just happened […]

Magic Projection Live @ TEDxTokyo 2010 from Marco Tempest on Vimeo. Applying infrared tracking to a projection surface, Magic Projection makes digital visuals more immersive by freeing the content from fixed real-world imagery. We saw the project at the end of last year, but technologist and magician Marco Tempest tells us he’s just completed the […]

Handheld music making gets its share of criticism and nose-upturning from “serious” digital musicians. Indeed, some of the apps hold up to a few minutes of casual use but fail to form that long-term relationship that makes us love musical tools and toys. Limitations can be good, but many of these tools aren’t open to […]

Google’s Android platform has gotten only a fraction of the attention for music making that iPhone OS and iPad have, but that doesn’t mean the OS doesn’t have some advantages of its own. Thanks to being an open OS, it’s also easier to install custom OSes, and repurpose older devices and build cheap embedded computers […]

Music scores remain one of the best ways to record or share many musical ideas. If you’ve done even casual notation, you’ve likely had the experience of scrawling something down on a scrap piece of paper, manuscript or otherwise. Imagine, instead, quickly scrawling something in the now-ubiquitous web browser window. Gregory Dyke writes with a […]

We’ve lived so long with a musical world dominated by the piano keyboard that it can be hard to look beyond it. But for some time, musicians have desired a set of common requirements for what might replace it: The ability to hit specific pitches in a convenient layout, perhaps one more convenient than the […]

The march of “because you can” experiments with the new generation of Web browsers continues. Last week, we saw real-time synthesis in the browser from a team at Mozilla. Next up: music notation. Mohit Muthanna has executed a gorgeous example of musical notation using HTML5’s Canvas. (The Canvas is a new feature of the Web […]

Photo courtesy Guitar Center. They describe the scene: “A shattered Kay acoustic guitar (Circa late 1950’s or early 1960’s) sits on the floor of Soundcheck Nashville, waiting to be assessed for damage.” Wherever they occur in the world, disasters’ material impact can be nearly as emotionally and personally challenging as loss of life. Floods in […]

Just how awesome is the GPU? So awesome. (That’s how we put it in highly technical jargon, anyway.) You’d be forgiven for being skeptical of what photorealistic rendering’s future might be. After all, we’ve been hearing about how raytracing and better-looking, more realistic renders would someday revolutionize 3D visuals, and that, thanks to the GPU, […]