Think back to playing a simply childhood game like Musical Chairs. The actual gameplay depends only on auditory clues – something you take for granted as a kid, but something apparently lost on game engineers who insist exclusively on advanced 3D rendering engines for visuals. And because you get your body involved, the game becomes […]

The duo Sepalcure – Praveen Sharma (aka Braille and PRAVEEN) and Travis Stewart (aka Machinedrum) – have already, as solo artists and as a duo, been a big part of the vibrations of so-called Bass Music. Originating from New York, the duo now champion their taste in sounds on two sides of the globe. Travis […]

Rocking it old skool… sort of. The iPod Classic, the true successor, ten years on. Photo (CC-BY-ND) Mac User’s Guide. The tenth anniversary of the iPod debut means you’ll find plenty of commentaries on Apple’s iPod and how it has changed music. It’s an issue that’s been talked to death enough, continuously, in the past […]

Something I always appreciated about classical music training was learning to appreciate the particulars of each instrument, whether or not you played them yourself. A French Horn, for instance, is not an instrument without challenges: everything from tuning to balancing dynamic range to how you look when you add and remove muting can be demanding. […]

Virtuoso coder and prolific digital artist Kyle McDonald is at it again, here in collaboration with similarly expressive and skilled coder Arturo Castro. Together, working in openFrameworks, they make use of a face tracking library to turn the image of a face into new, terrifying visions once imagined only in science fiction. Here, going beyond […]

Music visualization in Processing by yours truly. If you’re in the LA area, I’m teaching a reasonably beginner-friendly workshop in making musical tools with visual interfaces, using entirely free software (Processing and Pd, on Mac, Windows, Linux, and if you like, Android). It’s this coming Thursday night, September 8 – the perfect way to get […]

More than any technical obstacle, and very often more than any artistic or inspirational challenge, very often the single biggest enemy of music making is time. Finding a way to comfortably develop ideas anywhere, therefore, is a godsend. And some of our favorite artists are the ones who’ve found a way to simply keep producing. […]

Today, we note the availability on Android of Control, a WebKit-based touch interface also on iOS. For visualists and interactive designers, it’s worth paying attention to one feature in particular: dynamic interface creation. Perhaps biased by the musicians who have tended to embrace them, touch interfaces have tended to rely on the static layouts favored […]

Ed. Twisted Tools are a special breed of music software makers, concocting wild-sounding instruments, sequencers, and effects, all with a distinctively-colorful and graphical approach to interface design. And they do all of this in Reaktor, Native Instruments’ deep toolbox for visual development of soundmakers, a patching cousin to tools like Max/MSP, Pd, and Plogue Bidule. […]

It’s easy to forget that some of the simple joys of electronic music are foreign to many lay people. Odds are, if you read this site, you’re an intelligent and well-informed digital musician. (I don’t mean to stroke my own ego, either; because so many of you are intelligent and well-informed digital musicians, you send […]