Chicago-based hacker and synthesist Matt Heins is working on an open source synth kit. As a co-creator of the MeeBlip open source-synth hardware, I’m biased — I want more open synth hardware! So this is looking like some great company. The instrument is 8-bit, with analog filter circuitry, coded in C. The specs: Fully Open […]

In the realm of digital motion and pixel animation – albeit extremely low-resolution – here’s the clock for the open source lover, a hackable bedside clock that can be programmed to display custom animations. From random dots to Pac-Man cameos, it’s a clock that breaks from stock, coded by you instead of Sony. And there […]

It’s drumming, the multi-player game. The Drummer is an open-source application for the Nintendo DS handheld, developed by Andrea Bianchi and Woon Seung Yeo and presented alongside a paper earlier this year at the NIME Conference (The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression). As with any Nintendo homebrew software, you’ll need a special […]

If you hate modern samplers with all their supposed fidelity, longing instead for the glitchy digital distortion of samplers past, a DIY project has brought you the sounds you love. “Where’s the Party At?” has been inspiring tingly sensations in digital lovers since I first wrote about it in September. Now, the kit version is […]

Wish granted! Think 3D in the browser will never catch on? Think again. The folks at Google Labs have built an incredible-looking 3D API called O3D. It does just about everything you want, and then some: It’s multi-platform: Mac + Windows + Linux. It can render to both OpenGL and DirectX render pipelines. You can […]

Reverse Shadow Theatre from gabor papp on Vimeo. There’s no shortage of stunning motion graphics in the world. But something’s missing: human beings. Sure, you can render endless, polished animations, but can you perform with animation like you can a musical instrument? Just as studio recording gloss and sameness has made people crave live music […]

tbeta preview from ~ on Vimeo. Look out: multi-touch has a new rising star. The tbeta library (short, oddly, for The Beta) is an open-source framework for computer vision and multi-touch, and it’s particularly good at following your fingers. It’s a descendent of touchlib, with some of its ideas, though a completely new code base. […]

Cesare Marilungo has sent us a draft tutorial in development on using the iPhone / iPod Touch as a controller, via the open-source patching software Pure Data (Pd). He gives examples for both mrmr, the open-source project by Eric Redlinger here in NYC, and akaRemote.app from Masayuki Akamatsu (pictured). One advantage of akaRemote: you can […]

“If only Live could …” Hard-core Live users dream of more than just an extra feature widget or two. They imagine a world in which they can hack and alter the way Live itself behaves. They want the ability to develop software that works with Live at a low-level. In short, what they want is […]

Digital process has often been the enemy of craft. Italy, once the land of highly skilled typographers, calligraphers, and music engravers, has given way to static, boxed-up, boring fonts like the rest of the world. It’s only fitting, then, that some lovers of type and digital media would fight back. Andren writes in to share […]