Maschine’s hardware controller, which assigns dedicated physical control to the software’s functions. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Dmitriy G./droptune. “Feature creep” is a tricky thing. We all say we want tools that focus more on what we want rather than just add features. But some functionality is there for a reason. When Maschine came out, Native Instruments’ take […]

Ask a machine to emulate human creativity, and at the very least, you’re guaranteed to learn something. Modeling creative rules and intuitive algorithms as generative code is itself an eminently human activity – think of it as interactive theory. And where the computer fails to sound like a human, you learn something, too. Improv-Visor is […]

Shoes are the new turnables. Or at least that’s the conclusion you might reach after watching a new Japanese campaign for Nike’s Free Run+ running shoes. Apparently wishing to tout the bendable qualities of its new footwear, Nike enlisted sound artists to transform its product into a musical instrument. The shoes get plugged in, switched […]

As you probably know, Apple refreshed their MacBook Pro line, upgrading the 13″, 15″, and 17″ models to new NVIDIA GPUs and the 15″ and 17″ units to Core i5 and i7 CPUs. It’s a nice refresh for Mac fans, though a relatively modest one. Anyone hoping for a big leap in multi-core processing or […]

It’s almost impossible to come upon an electronic musical colleague – indeed, regardless of their personal genre – without some lament of the state of dance music. But electronic sound has long depended on the connections between experimental and dance, all the vibrations that can move people. Don’t complain – do something. Reaching across national […]

COLORFLEX, developed in Reaktor 5, offers a fascinating take on matrix sequencing. It’s just a sequencer, not something that makes noise itself – it sends notes, Control Change, and IC send – but what a sequencer it is. Color zones act as different “tracks” of material, allowing complex patterns to be layered atop a single […]

Apple today refreshed its MacBook Pro line in a long-awaited update, moving the Apple laptops in line with recent advancements in Intel CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs. There are some caveats when you pull apart the line, however – the 13″ models miss out on the new CPUs in this lineup, at least – and you’ll […]

If it’s not already “viral”, I’m sure it will be soon. Less than a year ago, Casey Pugh – then a developer at Vimeo – invited people to join him in remaking Star Wars, 15 seconds at a time. The final scene was completed on the 25th of February, and they’ve just released “The Escape”, […]

One of the most beloved tools in Nintendo DS homebrew has become free software, under the GPL v3. Talk about restrictive platforms – the DS requires special hardware just to get this app to run. But even with a couple of people involved in development, that could mean better, more frequent updates. I also wonder […]