Imagine an alternative universe in which simple digital handheld games evolved into sophisticated music tools. Oh, and they also made lots of really purty lights flash. Mmmmm … flashing lights. Well, that alternative universe seems to be right here. Mike Una gave us a massive dump of unusual new DIY sequencers, crafted from the ground […]

SND @ Club Transmediale 09 from Wuestenarchitekten on Vimeo. You’ve had those moments in which the dock of your Mac popped up or the mouse became visible. None of us enjoys that. But what about when the interface itself – the UI that’s directly related to producing what you’re trying to express — becomes visible? […]

Would You Like to Tap My Box? from kamoni on Vimeo. Drum machine lovers, you now have the beat gear equivalent of Matt Harding and Where the Hell is Matt?. Kamoni, aka sonic creator, composer, and experimenter Micah Frank, takes his favorite devices out on the road, piecing them together into an epic YouTubular jam. […]

I ask you: what is the foundation for rhythmic electronic music? I suggest that the humble step-sequencer is the backbone of many of today’s musical genres and memetic evolutions. To have electronic rhythm, you need to start with a clock and go from there, dividing it into fractions and multiples. Then start assigning sounds to […]

Yum. SuperCollider. Photo: CERN, via Flickr: Image Editor Free and open source software is nothing on its own. Like any technology, it’s the users and the community around it that make it meaningful. Musical practice grows out of culture and community; so does music technology. I’ve heard lots of people buzzing about Expo74, the Max/MSP/Jitter […]

Max/MSP: it does a body good! Photo (CC Yao Chung-Han / worKingLab) If you haven’t been following Max 5 updates, the folks at Cycling ’74 have been aggressively bug squashing. The changelog for 5.0.6 alone is exhaustive. (Via @rekkerd on Twitter, of rekkerd.org.) Updated: Also new in Max 5, it’s now possible as of 5.0.6 […]

Loops have gotten an unfortunate reputation as being a stand-in for real musicians or real musicianship – perhaps because, too often, they are. That’s why it’s always refreshing to see a discussion of how looping can incorporate musical technique. Like many electronic musicians, I have zero background in drumming; I’m a keyboardist and was trained […]

AudioMulch isn’t just a sequel or a new episode. This is AudioMulch: The Next Generation. We have holodecks in this one. That’s the claim of the developer, anyway, and looking at the features, I have to agree. AudioMulch has long been a cult favorite for people wanting to patch together unusual sonic tools and performance […]

The fantastic brightness of LED screens makes them one of the pinnacles of display technology for large events and installations. However their relative expense and size makes them inaccessible for smaller venues or budgets. Enter Evil Mad Scientist’s Peggy LED board. The Peggy 2.0 board allows the 25×25 LED to be addressed individually, and Jay […]

Maybe it was aesthetically incompatible with ugly PCs. Apogee Electronics has just announced they’ve dropped support development for Windows. Now, that’s their prerogative – not least because customers who prefer using Windows can simply choose to buy their competitors’ products. But in a press release entitled “Apogee Discontinues Windows Support,” “Apogee Discontinues Windows Development,” Apogee […]