One of the wonderful things about music in general is that basically anything can become a musical instrument — digital, electronic, or otherwise. The barrier to entry is neither skill nor means, but will. (or is that general craziness?) Musician and builder Eric Johnson surprised us at the last handmade music get-together in Brooklyn with […]

Footsteps from the abyss of total unawareness, musician and musicologist Clive Wearing has two lifelines: love and music. Suffering from an amnesia that robs him of nearly all memories beyond a few seconds, these bring him back from a waking death and become life and being itself: “I picked up some music,” Deborah wrote, “and […]

Not to be outdone by Logic Pro 8’s launch last week, Cakewalk has let slip the basic feature set of their latest version of their flagship SONAR DAW, with upgrades available immediately. What’s new — with an interesting emphasis on MIDI: A new step sequencer, looking reminiscent of tools like FL Studio (Fruity Loops), though […]

Numbers make beautiful art — especially illegal numbers. There’s something beautiful about making art with mundane tools, making something creative with something because, not simply in spite of, its limitations. And there’s likewise something surreal about Microsoft’s latest ad campaign for Office for the Mac: get artists to make subversive art with its old version […]

Tommy responds to our call for screen grabs of software with this fascinating Jitter patch: He writes: used lloopp and jitter runtime to make this instrument that uses a firewire camera as a source for effecting sound generators. i like this shot because of the video feedback. What’s lloopp? Glad you asked. It’s a live […]

The original Monome 40h music (and other media) controller has been replaced by new models, led by the new 256, a 16×16 grid. The buttons are smaller, retaining the approximate size and form factor of the original, but you get more buttons, a wooden case, and other improvements. Pre-orders are set for September 26. Lots […]

As I’m located outside the UK, I’ve been unable to get a TENORI-ON for review. This may be just as well; I’ve got a custom Monome project that’s filling up a bit of my time. Nick has an extensive, detailed video review for Sonic State, since we don’t: Review page from our friends at Sonic […]

Our friend David Battino writes from O’Reilly Digital Media site to share the massive reader response they got to the Zoom H2 recorder. (The H2 is a smaller version of the H4, which made a guest appearance of sorts on Morning Edition this week.) Mark Nelson didn’t manage to make this his fifth portable flash […]

There’s something to be said for making connections in hardware studios: if you’ve got the cables, you can make it happen. In the world of the computer, it’s another story. The vision of Jack is to make routing audio between software as flexible. As the creators put it: Have you ever wanted to take the […]

Brad Linder, a freelance journalist, shared his Zoom H4 mobile battery pack hack at a recent coworking event in Brooklyn called Jelly. The idea of coworking is to get “virtual” electronic workers out of their apartments and in an environment where they can meet other people. “Lonely” I think is the wrong word, as many […]