A combination of frenetic CDM backend design work and all of my clients finally giving me materials 2 weeks before I leave to holiday in Vietnam has kept me from writing, and for that I apologize. Peter has or course kept up the fantastic content, but there is some more material which needs to be […]

There are lots of fantastic music tools out there, but some of them just inspire love and envy, and the Moog Little Phatty certainly fits the bill. Via Matrixsynth, Melbourne Sydney-based composer / music maven Sofie Loizou has posted her unboxing ceremony and first impressions of the Moog synth. (At this point, I would normally […]

At the beginning of 2006, we learned that legendary guitarist Robert Fripp would create a musical theme for Windows Vista, following in the footsteps of the likes of Brian Eno. Well, after a brief joke that circulated about what the sound set would sound like, here’s the real sound theme, at least as far as […]

When those infants graduate from playing with computer music-controlling pacifiers, they can move on to blocks. Our friend Nat points today to a brilliant tangible computing interface that generates sequences of musical events. (Also seen last week on Matrixsynth.) The transmitter (some sort of RF operation) communicates with a receiver connected to the compute, and […]

At first, I thought I was reading something wrong when I got this press release this morning: “Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company, announced today an agreement which creates a groundbreaking, new revenue stream for UMG and its artists: in addition to the standard payments it will make […]

Image from Whizz, projected at a Romanian club by Jan Kremlacek and coded in Processing. Last week, we saw how Flash and Processing code can create custom VJ and visualization tools. Custom code means custom results, and all sorts of dynamic new possibilities for visuals. Jan Kremlacek writes from the Czech Republic to share his […]

As widely expected, Apple has given its MacBook Core 2 Duo CPUs, as with its existing MacBook Pro. The MacBook ships with either a 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo chip with a 2MB L2 cache or a 2 GHz CPU with a 4GB L2 cache. To me, the added MHz along with the added cache and […]

Is it the call of the ocean? The primordial urge to return to our pre-human evolutionary roots, the womb? Hand dryness caused by too many hours at the computer? Whatever the reason, interactive musicians keep designing wild instruments involving water. The latest comes from Australian hacker / designer / instrument builder Sebastian Tomczak. He’s turned […]

What good is open source hardware? How about hacking in additional functionality by adjusting the code and electronics? The creators of Monome have a new video demonstrating some of the possibilities for user modifications to their hardware project. Included: Optical encoders allow additional multi-touch interactions, for a game of Life (the grid-based life simulation of […]