In June 2005, we first saw the Tenori-On, a futuristic music-making device covered in a grid of interactive, lit buttons, designed by the talented interactive artist Toshio Iwai as a prototype for Yamaha. Last week, Yamaha revealed some details about plans to make Iwai’s experimental device into a shipping product. (I missed this in preparations […]

If you’re planning to build a creative new instrument or interface for music, and you don’t already have the open source Arduino project on your watch list, you should put it there. Chris O’Shea at Pixelsumo brings some great new goodies for Arduino lovers via the Italian project site / tutorial site / shop Tinker.it:

Once, digital image editing was a fringe medium. Now, almost everyone who uses a computer does basic image editing. So, I’m pleased to get to talk today at Macworld Expo about live visuals and reactive/interactive animation. I chose some relatively simple examples since time was short, just to cover the basics. I think some of […]

When those infants graduate from playing with computer music-controlling pacifiers, they can move on to blocks. Our friend Nat points today to a brilliant tangible computing interface that generates sequences of musical events. (Also seen last week on Matrixsynth.) The transmitter (some sort of RF operation) communicates with a receiver connected to the compute, and […]

While Peter is away I thought I’d visit a topic central to what CDMu is about, but rarely visited: Procuring Music. We (and by “we” I do of course mean “you”, powerful yet supple reader) spend rather a lot of time analyzing and discussing the tools and processes for creating music, but don’t seem to […]

One notable problem with Java (and thus Processing) is that, on its own, it’s not the best solution for doing the pixel-by-pixel processing and computer vision / motion tracking / video analysis, as it’s not as efficient for those kind of tasks as C/C++. The motion tracking / computer vision library for processing JMyron is […]

As someone relatively new to Processing, I’ve experienced equal parts excitement and frustration. 0115 is a reasonably mature build, and I’m glad I didn’t try this earlier, but more advanced work is likely to get easier as the software develops, improves, and squashes bugs. Before I dive into the full, technical explanation for those of […]

TyphoonLabs Shader Designer is a free IDE for creating your own vertex and pixel/fragment shaders, the magical code snippets that process 3D geometries, textures, and even images and video on your GPU. I’ve been fiddling around with it a bit on Windows as I work on learning OpenGL’s shading language, GLSL, and it seems quite […]

One major carrot Microsoft is holding out to convince people to upgrade to Vista some time next year is the broadly-overhauled DirectX 10. I’m skeptical about many of the new features in Vista, but I have to say, DirectX 10 is tempting, at least based on what we know now. Details are somewhat sketchy, but […]