Could busking – street music performance – be a tool for social change? It’s an idea I’ve heard artists mull before. Here’s one opportunity to do just that next month, in April, in support of building badly-needed school facilities in southern Zambia. And yes, digital musicians can participate, thanks to terrific, affordable, battery-powered amplification. I […]

Record giant Universal Music Group is cutting prices on the CD, as analysts clamor for still-lower prices. But as for actual records – the kind made of vinyl – odder and odder innovations flourish. If the CD is dying, the vinyl record is an undead, sexually-alluring vampire. Two recent releases not only treat the record […]

“Press play” … “button-mashing” … the very criticism of digital music is often directed at the button or switch, even as the cult hit monome spreads arrays of buttons like a virus. Well, we’re still interested in what you can do with a button, so to fully focus you, we’re only giving you one button […]

I’ve been reasonably quiet of late, and for that I apologize. I hope, though, that when you hear the reason, you’ll find it in the cold technological cores of your beings to forgive me. My government has seen fit to create an enormously amazing resource and incubator for technological artists. It’s called The Edge, and […]

Tired of needing xx more knobs or yy more pads or a specific feature in your control hardware? Ready to dive in and build your own? You’ve had a variety of options for some time that can help get you started, but Livid’s new Builder set of modular platforms is uniquely well-suited to the kinds […]

This freaky-looking screen image: yours free. It looks like you’re navigating some microscopic rover on another planet. Awesome. More software is speaking timecode, opening up control of digital sound to real, physical vinyl on turntables. The latest addition: Time TunnelXL is a pair of externals that decodes Native Instruments’ Traktor Scratch vinyl and scratches not […]

Argos Interface Builder, v0.20 from Dimitri Diakopoulos on Vimeo. You know the game: you decide you want exactly 8 knobs and 10 faders. But your hardware interface has 8 knobs and 8 faders. And then you realize you could use 4 more knobs. The appeal of touch interfaces is clear: you get controls that grow […]

It’s like Woodstock for Web music tech nerds. Photo (CC-BY) Anton Lindqvist. “Okay,” you say to the Web geeks, “I’ve had enough. I don’t want another little app that looks at my iTunes collection and tells me that if I like Lady Gaga, I probably also like Madonna. I want to listen in new ways […]