In a surprise announcement (well, surprising me, at least), the experimental MySong shown by Microsoft Research earlier this year will be available for sale. US$29.95 will buy you a downloadable auto-accompaniment tool. Windows-only, but it sounds as though a Mac release is in store (seriously). It’s a bit like Band-in-a-Box for singers: sing in a […]

“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]

It’s looking like 2009 is set to be a great year for open source and hardware hacking. Likely lost in a lot of the CES news, BUG Labs, makers of open source, Linux-based hardware you can snap together like Lego bricks, now has a range of new modules. Most interesting to readers here: there’s an […]

Need some New Year inspiration on several levels? dickypan points to this brilliant New Year’s video. It’ll make you feel good about all dimensions of 2009. Motion graphics fly out of augmented reality, triggered by small objects on the screen. The work is based on an open source framework. Here it’s running in Flash, as: […]

One chip to rule them all: over a quarter century later, the sounds of this chip are reborn in the newest mobile devices. Photo (CC) Dejdżer / Digga. Take a look at the long view of history, and the Commodore 64 fares nicely. It remains the most popular computer of all time. And this newfangled […]

Finally, NVIDIA extends a welcome mat. Photo by Anna Irsch. For graphics cards, drivers are everything: it’s just not possible to be on top of stability, performance, and functionality without access to new, stable drivers. But for Windows notebooks, unlike desktops, traditionally you had to turn to OEM PC vendors to get your NVIDIA graphics […]

From top: a simple, accessible creation by Eoin – now just imagine this pulsing around and some effects and you’ve got a VJ project, too. And a video shows Google really is hoping to bring 3D to the masses. Visualists entering the world of 3D face a major hurdle: making 3D models. Google SketchUp is […]

The idea of the Reactable is to make music tangible, with control of sound mapped to physical objects you move around on a table. But that hasn’t stopped the Psychosynth from creating a virtual version. (Upside: it’s a lot more portable.) Psychosynth Watch the video, but they seem to have made the opening minutes as […]

We really do need a new rich Internet platform. We need more seamless platforms that work across operating systems and mobile devices. And, in an issue extremely relevant to this site, we need development tools that make it easier for artists of all kinds to create media software and digital artwork and performance tools. The […]

PEMF Sessions: Pilot from Primus Luta on Vimeo. It’s a bit trippy as you make your way through the opening of this video, which features a spooky song and, awesomely, a hooded man who has replaced his face with a certain hit open source controller. (“Darling, wake up, you’re shouting the names of Max/MSP patches […]