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 […]

FRACT is a curious combination of music studio and puzzle game, merging elements of games like Myst with the sorts of synths and pattern editors you’d expect somewhere like Ableton Live. You have to make sounds and melodies to solve puzzles; by the end of the game, say the creators, you’re even producing original music. […]

You know the type. The drummer who, even robbed of drum sticks, is tapping on the walls, the car door, the desk… and maybe you are that person. When rhythms and musical gestures are bouncing around your head, the whole world just feels like something you want to play. It seems as natural as breathing. […]

Despite how it might seem to some, Apple probably isn’t turning its back on the Mac – even if it’s dropping the “Mac” from the name of its OS. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Shane Doucette. See a significant correction below; an earlier version of this story claimed incorrectly that Windows on ARM would be limited in how […]

For the last few decades, generally speaking, we’ve had computers, and we’ve had physical, modular, analog gear. Computers are endlessly patchable, but not using physical cords. Modulars use physical cords, but they lack the flexibility (and affordability) of a computer. Now, US$25 and an Arduino can change that. rePatcher is a simple, tangible modular interface […]

Dewanatron’s Brian and Leon were on-hand with their unique inventions. Photos by Marsha Vdovin for CDM. For the lover of musical instruments and technology, southern California’s NAMM show is a giant toy shop. It’s work for many of its attendees, of course, but we know many of our readers dream of the objects that will […]

GraffitiMarkupLanguage.com (Trailer) from Evan Roth on Vimeo. Imagine data that stores digital, virtual graffiti tags as easily as you store text. Imagine, then, the power to record and playback tags at different scales, using everything from projection mapping to robotics. Graffiti Markup Language is in ongoing development, but it’s already accomplishing those aims. More: Graffiti […]