I don’t know if it’s “the most revolutionary new musical instrument of the last 60 years,” but let’s be clear on one thing: the Eigenharp Alpha is utterly, beautifully insane. It combines breath and finger input in a bassoon form factor, but with quite a lot more physical control, a computer connection, and no internal […]

Part of the beauty of the iPhone from its launch date was the notion of a Mac you could fit in the palm of your hand. That makes it ironic that, for so many developers, mobile platforms in general have turned into a way to fragment software, to make it run fewer places instead of […]

Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working. It seems not quite accurate to describe this […]

“Games” are, at their heart, high-performance, real-time-optimized, interactive three-dimensional graphics engines. And that means that, by focusing on their live graphical capabilities, they can become incredibly advanced live visual instruments – the stuff of VJs and visualists. A number of artists have put that to good use. Riley Harmon sends along his work with the […]

Bliss – SevenUpLive 1.4 Preview from bar|none on Vimeo. monome lovers have come from all over the planet to exchange tips and creative ideas and check out music here in Princeton, New Jersey at the Monomeet. I’m here shooting some video, so expect a feature and links to some of the projects in a few […]

I got to spend yesterday working with the Launchpad; see the video above which I think should help you get a sense of scale and what it looks like. (Also on YouTube) We have additional videos from other sources below. It’s only been public for less than 24 hours, but as we did with the […]

A monome-like grid controller built for Live, shipping in November for $199 – and I’ve got a first hands-on look with the hardware. The feature that makes Ableton Live Ableton Live has always been its Session View, an array of Lego-like blocks of music triggering samples and patterns. In the grand tradition of the MPC, […]

It’s simply stunning some of the terrific instrument and effect plug-ins available that are now free and open source – yes, free as in freedom, not just freeware. I had commented in the past something along the lines of, “boy, wouldn’t it be great if this now meant, say, a Linux port?” and then went […]

Alongside our Renoise + Indamixx netbook-optimized production competition, I’m kicking off this week a series of CDM and guest tutorials on working with Linux audio tools, Renoise, and more. First up, here’s a basic look at how to route the free-as-in-beer linuxDSP effects toolkit into the powerful, modern, open-source DAW Ardour. Correction: I implied that […]

I want to highlight a comment from a recent story in which I was reflecting on how to approach Processing, and – in a larger sphere – design simplicity. Tom writes: My opinion – the problem with Processing is that is not part of a software ecosystem. Flash is aligned with Illustrator and After Effects […]