Pure Data is a wonder: a free and open source environment for creating your own musical and multimedia creations with graphical programming, from Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max. You can produce everything from interactive sequencers and drum machines to synths to video performance tools by connecting patch cables visually, and you can run […]

Hear the idea of creating a car sound, and you might imagine a sound designer working on a video game or film. Imagining that person producing a sound for an actual car could sound like a joke. But as today’s vehicles go silent – whisper-quiet electric cars to human-powered bicycles – the problem of imagining […]

(CC-BY) Axel Tregoning. (CC-BY) Marcin Wichary. Jack Tramiel, who died this week, had as deep an impact on computer music for the everyday musician as just about any computing industry pioneer. While Jobs, Woz, Moore, Grove, and Gates get a lot of the attention, Tramiel’s legacy was in making computing affordable and accessible. As such, […]

Finding something intelligent to say after watching Beeple is like trying to compose a work email after sex. You just want to sit in the afterglow. Beeple’s tenth instrumental film is full of three-dimensional goodness, a joy ride through a fantastic, videogame world. It’s also eminently musical. As fanciful characters pop out of a rotating […]

Endeavour’s Evo Series One, which we looked at in the fall, does something different with the conventional keyboard: it adds a touch-sensitive surface to the top of the keys, allowing you to run your fingers up and down the keys for added expression. I got a chance to try the Evo today, and I’m impressed. […]

What you’re watching in the video above doesn’t involve cameras or motion sensors. It’s the kind of brain-to-machine, body-to-interaction interface most of us associate with science fiction. And while the technology has made the occasional appearance in unusual, niche commercial applications, it’s poised now to blow wide open for music – open as in free […]

Digital artist and imagineer Memo Akten, known for beautiful work like his dazzling, sparkling open source fluid library, has lately turned his attention to intersections of visual motion and musical pattern. In a series of etudes, he applies simple, sinusoidal motion to musical patterning. That is, as abstract waves flow on the screen, they trigger […]

Visionary 3D scanning, computer vision, and digital media guru Kyle McDonald is back again with more tools that break down the boundary between the computer and the world. Kyle tells us he spent a great part of the fall in residence at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in Japan. He worked with […]

Pure Data (Pd) is already a free, convenient tool for making synths, effects, and sequencers and other musical generators. But imagine stripping away all the things that tie it to a platform – UI, specific hardware support – so it will run just about anywhere, on anything, in any context. That’s what libpd, a free, […]

Instead of writing on paper, a sound executed in paper in three dimensions. All images courtesy the artists. Speaking of making the ephemeral tangible, as artist Andrew Spitz tells us, “it’s a fun process to map something that is so fleeting as a sound to a physical object.” That’s what he does in a new […]