The age of the high-density screen has begun. You can bet these will start to replace the tired (and functionally limiting) LED readouts of the past. The upshot: hardware with usability rivaling computers. Oh, and it’ll look damned purty. Teenage Engineering has this gorgeous vid of the Operator-1 “OP-1” controller/synth prototype in action: NOW talk […]

A real highlight for me at the Game Developer Conference was getting to hear Satoru Iwata deliver the keynote. Aside from being CEO of Nintendo as they have launched their most successful console ever, Iwata-san has left a sizable development legacy as a veteran of HAL Laboratory (Balloon Fight, Kirby). In the game community, I […]

No Carrier (a.k.a. Don Miller) has released glitchNES, a ROM (read: game cartridge) that makes user-controlled visuals on the old school Nintendo Entertainment System, with results that resemble the effects of circuit-bending. glitchNES is free, open source, and runs well on NES hardware and in accurate emulators, e.g., Nestopia. Get it from No-Carrier.com. As Don […]

It’s a tough time for the music tech industry like so many industries. But there are beautiful products coming from independent developers – indie, boutique shops crafting musical instruments in code. The folks at Devine Machine, makers of the likes of Guru and Lucifer, unloaded three big announcements overnight – enough to make you think […]

The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition is a cash prize contest for new musical instruments held this month at Georgia Tech, judged by Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk, Harmonix co-founder Eran Egozy, and Georgia Tech’s Parag Chordia. There are some familiar faces in there, but some fascinating, new ideas, too, like a motorcycle engine you can play […]

Touch interfaces abound on this site, but Usine has one edge: it’s built right out of the box to enable touch interfaces with custom, modular creation of whatever you might like. And there’s now an Ableton Live template in testing, with a lovely 5×5 controller. The advantage of working this way, as I see it, […]

Depeche Mode’s latest album, “Sounds of the Universe,” is due April 20 internationally. I got the chance to cover the band for Keyboard Magazine, speaking with Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher as well as returning producer Ben Hillier, who was a big part of the signature sound of 2005’s “Playing the Angel.” Martin developed eBay […]

c Ever feel like you’ve found the seam dividing past and future? The past: restrictive UI frameworks requiring pages and pages of code to produce dated-look 2D displays. Proprietary software with rigid interfaces. Input bottlenecked through the x and y coordinates of a single mouse pointer. The future: UIs whipped together graphically or with a […]

Photo: Orin Zebest. Are you sick of the death of dynamic range? Are you mad as hell at squashed audio that means to be “loud” and only wind up with the actual sounds smooshed out? Alternatively, are you guilty of some detail-squishing dynamic abuse yourself? A campaign is on to get the dynamic war out […]