Reason’s Rack, a walled garden no more. Hmmm… “reason.” “Logic.” I’m calling my next musical creation “Inanity.” Sound good? Who’s in? Photo (CC-BY) Marco Raaphorst. He’s a fan. Users want more: that much is clear. But for years, Reason has famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) resisted plug-in formats as a way […]

The original vision of the MeeBlip was to make something affordable, something open and hackable, something anyone could get, something that could tell a story, and something we’d use to make some music. And since those are all goals of Create Digital Music, too, it’s a perfect physical compliment to what we do. For me, […]

With new hybrid performance comes new hybrid tools, as artists can work with an arsenal of evolving, often open, creative visual software. In a new performance for Australian Dance Theater, multiple tools merge to produce an array of visual features to accompany the choreography. Some of the glue is Syphon, the open source framework for […]

The work by Theo Watson and team has been one of those magical technological revelations that makes people say “oh – that’s what that’s for.” Say computer vision or tracking, or show the typical demo of what these can do with interaction, and eyes glaze over. But make them work as puppetry, and somewhere deep […]

Look at a music software interface – particularly a tracker-style interface – and you might easily see something resembling a spreadsheet. So, why not gaze into the cells of a spreadsheet and begin to imagine music? Karlsruhe-based electronic artist and programmer Patrick, cappel:nord, had just such a flight of fancy about office software. He explains:

Diaspora is an attempt to build a social network that contrasts with the locked-garden vision of Facebook, one built on open source software, open exchange of information, and distributed – rather than centralized – communication. I already let slip that we’ll be rebooting our own social endeavor, Create Digital Noise, in the new year. But […]

On US soil today, it’s Thanksgiving. I’m over 3600 miles away, myself, from the place that began as home this year in New York, but ready to celebrate a day off anyway as I take in Eindhoven’s STRP Festival and prepare for performing on Saturday back in Berlin. But whether you’re in the US or […]

Between conventional knobs and hardware controls and “magical” tablets, might we yet see real action in a third category of controller? Keith McMillen Instruments, makers of the SoftStep foot controller and K-Bow controller, are now venturing into fingertip territory. The QuNeo is a “crowd-sourced” project with apparently some open components, available now in preorder form […]

My God, it’s full of code. OpenFrameworks, an artist-friendly creation environment that unlocks the brain-melting power of code in C++, now has a helpful guide to all the additional power you can add. Just as Processing, the code tool that helped inspire OF, benefits from the vast planetary resources in the Java language, so, too, […]