PEMF Lessons: Bidule – Direct Cabling & Your Default Layout from Primus Luta on Vimeo. Ed.: Music creation is all about the special relationship we have with certain, powerful tools. And one app that gets very little attention is unquestionably the deep but elegant modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. CDM turns to power user Primus […]

Perhaps it’s the church setting for the installation, or the strains of 17th-Century choral composition by Allegri. But Streetwise Opera’s My Secret Heart, binding together reactive visuals and post-Minimalist musical strains, has the feeling of a 21st Century passion play, a digital devotional piece. My Secret Heart is a commission by Streetwise Opera, which develops […]

Perhaps it’s the church setting for the installation, or the strains of 17th-Century choral composition by Allegri. But Streetwise Opera’s My Secret Heart, binding together reactive visuals and post-Minimalist musical strains, has the feeling of a 21st Century passion play, a digital devotional piece. My Secret Heart is a commission by Streetwise Opera, which develops […]

Now that Macs run Intel processors, what was once unimaginable is suddenly possible. There’s certainly no shortage of plug-ins available on Mac OS, but users may still have Windows plug-ins they miss. Released as beta today from SM Pro Audio, VFX is an app that lets you host your PC plug-ins on your Mac: VFX […]

While we’re on the subject of User Interface… Adobe, as makers of the dominant creative software that powers the planet, are certainly due some criticism. But beware the wrath of the angry user. Via lili katschen on Twitter, I see the Intersphere has its own forums for endless Adobe gripes. Now, don’t get me wrong: […]

Trackmate LusidOSC Sequencer Application from Adam Kumpf on Vimeo. Want to interact with your computer musically using physical objects and other fancy-schmancy, science-fiction-y interfaces? Don’t want to rely on Microsoft or wait until 2019? You’re in luck. It’s like Christmas for DIYers and interactive futurists. Enter LusidOSC, a set of protocols, libraries, and useful code, […]

The urgency of being way behind a single dominant player can make electronics makers do some odd stuff to promote their products. iPod, once an icon of digital cool, has achieved such ubiquity that it doesn’t even try to be hip any more. The thing is being promoted with American Idol, for crying out loud […]

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 […]

Life is short. You find yourself having to absorb the work techniques of a lot of different software. And some of those divisions — between vector and pixels, 3D and 2D, motion and stills — look increasingly old-fashioned. Since the early 90s, we’ve seen a succession of software try to bridge those gaps. But for […]