The Monome‘s clean-slate grid of light-up buttons has proven a huge hit, not only among musicians but multimedia artists in general. It’s been such an Internet sensation that many people assume some significant company is behind it. In reality, part of the clarity of the design comes from the homemade approach to design and construction, […]

Seeing through walls in Chris’ Out of Bounds. Photo by the artist, via Flickr. Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call […]

For more on the creation of the new VISP visual app, there’s a terrific story by creator Michael Creighton at Adobe Edge: Building a visual performance app with Adobe AIR, Flex, and Flash The advantages of this combination are potent for visual development: File system API (so you can easily manage video clips, generative sketches, […]

Working on digital visuals for choreographer Grisha Coleman’s echo::system, I got to try some new techniques for running visuals. These were necessary experiments, so naturally we had some things that worked well, and some that didn’t. (For more on the piece, see the project site; warning: auto-playing audio via Flash!) Two particular pieces of gear […]

One of the wonderful things about music in general is that basically anything can become a musical instrument — digital, electronic, or otherwise. The barrier to entry is neither skill nor means, but will. (or is that general craziness?) Musician and builder Eric Johnson surprised us at the last handmade music get-together in Brooklyn with […]

Sampling and remix culture is the future, right? Not if you ask a lot of music lovers at the moment. The guest for the CDM Random Rant of the Week is our friend Liz. It’s an issue I suspect has troubled some readers here, especially as music technology is equated to the sample/remix culture (especially […]

Kids get hands-on with the music, touching materials found on-location at the installation site. Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work. Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, […]

MP3s, bad because they have less music in them. So much less music, in fact, that your brain loses the ability to feel emotions listening to them. Okay, sure, over-compressed MP3s sound awful, especially at lower bitrates. But get ready for some strange psychoacoustics here, folks. Producers howl over sound cut out by MP3 compression […]