Monome Life, indeed. What makes the Monome so wonderful is not so much that the hardware and software itself are open source — nice as that may be — but that they have become a platform for experimentation and personalization. Max/MSP, now freshly injected with life following its version-5 release, has a similar ethos. Here […]

Mrmr is a wonderful tool for turning your Apple mobile device into a multi-touch controller for performance and controlling visuals and music. It allows custom control layouts, it’s beautifully geared to things you can do with your fingertips, and it’s fully open source. As is often the case on this site, we have two messages. […]

What could a pocket-sized computer be? It could be a new kind of album extra (yawn), a new kind of generative musical format that samples and responds to the world around it (whoo). It could be a more effective controller (fun), or an Indian drone (really). The Apple iPod touch / iPhone, as always, brings […]

I’ve been following Ruin & Wesen’s development as they’ve been hard at work on new, petite MIDI controllers, promising to be the first of a line of DIY-friendly controllers. “Open source hardware” has been getting a lot of play as a concept, but the idea here is really built around the product: their stated claims […]

Clockwise from left: a proposed design for the MTmini project, which you can get your hands on on the cheap; the open-source multi-touch TouchKit project, developed by resident researchers at Eyebeam and open to developers; a new entry, the lovely (but apparently not yet available) MultiTouch Cell promises to be a plug-and-play product. Multi-touch for […]

Sometimes, simple stuff matters. DJ mixers like Pioneer’s DJM-800 have simple, single-knob low- and high-pass filters. Laptop software often doesn’t. Enter FZero, with his free and open source Single Knob Filter to fill the gaps. (Windows-only, built in SynthEdit, but it’s open source and schematics of the basic signal processing are available, if anyone wants […]

Reason number 3,174 why I love Germany: it’s the one nation that has both arcane governmental procedures and the avant-garde musicians to turn them into protest art — with the chops in Pure Data (Max’s open source cousin) to squeeze 70,000+ samples into a tiny space. Song registration requires citing each sample? No problem — […]

Sound design secrets have traditionally been closely-guarded secret sauce. But in the age of the Web, the opposite is happening: people can actually enjoy sharing what they’re doing, just as passionate cooks chat about recipes on food blogs. Case in point: reader John Keston writes to tell us about AudioCookbook.org, on which he’s blogging a […]