Cigarette lighters in the air may have given way to smartphones – but it’s hardly fitting at a concert to watch everyone checking their SMS inbox. In a new twist, Dan Deacon concerts use all that computational power in people’s pockets to make these devices part of the show, refocusing fans on the music. The […]

Computers give you sophisticated ways of connecting to online music. But do you ever miss that physical object of the radio? Or wish that a speaker could be just as smart when, with a sigh of relief, you’ve pressed the laptop lid shut? Skube is a design experiment from Copenhagen focused on making portable devices […]

If electronic music sometimes seems to contain the secret dance language of insects, mysterious coded rhythms and swarms of sound, an EP released this summer by an English producer makes the connection explicit. Bioni Samp sends us his strange and wonderful sonic journey into the colony. In tunes alternately atmospheric and danceable, at least of […]

Pure [creative] Data / Stereolux Nantes (29-30 mars 2012) from stereolux on Vimeo. A personal note from this editor: I like to start my weekend with a bit of inspiration, so it seems good habit to leave you with the same. Looking through my story inbox, I almost posted a studio video of an artist […]

For years, many Mac-using audio creators have longed to get the beloved editor Sound Forge on the Mac. And when well-known audio editor BIAS Peak unexpectedly died, and we called for alternatives, various readers looked with envy back at Windows at the PC-only tool – among various other alternatives. Now, those prayers are answered. After […]

Press a key or two, take a screenshot. It’s been dead-simple for ages. But not so if you just want to grab some sound – until now. WavTap, from coder and GitHub user Patrick Ellis of Berlin, finally makes grabbing audio on the Mac work the way you’ve imagined it should work. Hit a keyboard […]

*spark d-fuser: demo from toby*spark on Vimeo. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s nearly here. The first hardware mixing for laptops that’s practical and affordable for the visual community has arrived. And it should be just the tip of the iceberg. Back in 2009, we celebrated Toby Spark’s community-led video mixing, and bravely […]

What if a game made you both player and remixer/composer? What if that music plugged into your gameplay brain just like the interactive elements? This week, we get another try at just that – and find out how the whole thing works behind the scenes, with free software you can use, too. If you’re like […]

You’ve got something on the screen from one program – an animation, 3D generative eye candy, video whatever. You want to have that texture working somewhere else, so you could, say, mix it with some video clips in your VJ app. Intuitively, you want to just be able to “pipe” the texture from one place […]

Photos courtesy the artist. We have data in pictures, we have data in Facebook posts – why not data as music? In the latest data sonification project, the record of travel becomes an oddly-beautiful set of percussive harmonies. And it’s a “record” in every sense: artist and composer Brian House not only composes the data […]