Photo (CC) Clonny. Details on Flickr. With the weakened world economy, content in general faces plenty of gloom and doom. Advertising models are severely weakened. But, oddly, in the world of music, there are some positive signs that the shift to decentralized, online distribution might actually be going well — and maybe economic pressures are […]

In that summer movie mood? Jeremy Rotsztain has been working on a new series of digital art that derives Jackson Pollock-style action paintings from Hollywood action movies. Software processes the video of explosions and other action sequences from classic movies and “paints” them into abstract art, leaving a trace of the action as splattered color […]

WalkSX from Gijs on Vimeo. As the Sony Walkman turns 30, many of the mobile cassette’s fans wax nostalgic. But it takes Gijs Gieskes to wire up a new Rube Goldberg-style musical instrument based on the Walkman’s simple tape playback. Follow along carefully through the signal flow of this unusual instrument: 1. The Walkman has […]

Drum machines with tubes: from Wurlitzer’s classic SideMan to a new prototype, drum machines can make tubes rock even harder. What happens when adept sonic inventor Eric Barbour of Metasonix makes a drum machine out of clever circuits and vacuum tubes? Well, in the creator’s words: “It makes noise … a lot of noise.”

If you work with video at all, you’re likely already best friends with VideoLAN’s VLC Media Player, the lightweight, fool-proof Mac/Windows/Linux player that somehow manages to play any video file on any OS without intervention. So, it was big news last week as VLC hit the 1.0 milestone, a major, polished, stable release of this […]

The Linn 9000 shipped way back in 1984, but could nearly pass for a shipping product today. So, since the LinnDrum II mock-ups look nothing like the current design, let’s feast our eyes on this instead. Roger Linn, father of the modern drum machine and creator of some of its greatest models (including the MPC60 […]

Reflect by Joshua Davis – separate post on this coming, Joshua! When the iPhone was first unveiled, many of us hoped that was was effectively a palm-sized Mac could be used with some of the same freedom that a computer could, that its screen could be used for pocketable art. That transformation has unquestionably come […]

We’ve all watched and commented on bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails releasing free albums and still profiting by them. Will this model still work for new artists, though? Trent Reznor posted yesterday that the Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication reissue is “how you sell music today”. As a rebuttal to the usual “that only […]

When applications are open to clearly-expressed control, it’s easier than ever – easier than with MIDI – to navigate their interfaces and make them express what you want. Using OSC (rather inaccurately named Open “Sound” Control), interacting with live visuals is getting a lot more powerful. Case in point: thanks to hacks, we’re getting affordable […]

What if you could record directly online from a Web browser – no additional software needed? It’s not a new idea, but online music community Indaba has an interesting new Java-based tool that gets one step closer. We took a first look at the tool last month, but it’s now publicly available at indabamusic.com today. […]