Didier Dambrin, FL Studio’s original creator, has a new synth entitled Harmor that looks like one to watch. There’s a beautiful crop of new synthesizers this season that could have you yearning for a winter spent with long nights somewhere deep in the Northern Hemisphere, producing new music – see also, to name just one, […]

Cyber-illusionist Marco Tempest speaks in a full length video to the Innovators@Google series at Google’s New York offices. Marco, whose work we’ve followed before, is unique in that his presentation isn’t just a series of visual tricks, however wondrous. He roots his work in the history of magic and illusion, not only technically but as […]

CoGe is an upstart VJ app on the Mac, built on the foundations of Quartz Composer as a standalone VJ app. It’s been winning over some converts already – as indicated in our recent survey. But here’s the big release: version 1.0, a ground-up rewrite, which in turn debuts the app as a commercial tool. […]

Scratching, meet recycling. Rather than allow MIDI DJ controllers to consign themselves to landfills, a new open source project promises to retrofit these gadgets with scratch capabilities. Scratch Decoder is a collaborative, open source effort to add or extend obsolete controllers, CDJs, and turntables with digital vinyl control – before they get tossed. Inspired by […]

There’s a new analog Moog effect in town. So who better to tell us about it and get us some hands-on time than Moog Music’s Chief Engineer? Moog’s next Moogerfooger, the Cluster Flux or “MF-108M” if you want to sound more serious, promises to be a versatile analog effect processor. It’s a flanger / chorus […]

Nerds: It’s an OSC sequencer. It’s JavaScript-programmable for making your own generative music. It works with hardware and other software. You can use it in real-time. Everyone: it makes spectacularly strange sounds out of spectacularly beautiful flows of geometries through space. IanniX, the latest-generation descendant of work done by pioneering experimental composer Iannis Xenakis, has […]

Lovers of the grid for music control now get to reenact the scene in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz, stepping out of the world of black and white into one of color. The OhmRGB, the latest controller from Austin, Texas-based controller and custom hardware shop Livid Instruments, adds multicolor LEDs behind its array of controls. […]

Imagine access to the power of the modern Web browser – the HTML5 Canvas, hardware-accelerated graphics via WebGL, animation, and more. Now imagine that instead of writing code to access that power, you can connect modules for graphical patching. Windows visualists may recognize the software VVVV. But whereas that tool was restricted to the capabilities […]

Avid released Sibelius 7 yesterday. Highlights in the new version: A new UI. The most apparent change is a new user interface with dockable, tabbed panels. The design borrows heavily from Microsoft’s Office Ribbon, though a more subdued appearance makes it look just as comfortable on the Mac. My guess is that power users may […]

Casey Reas, co-creator (with Ben Fry) of the elegant Processing coding environment so beloved now by artists, talks to our friends at The Creators Project in a recent video. Processing may be best known as only a tool, but it’s also become an open source conduit for ideas in aesthetics and digital art. Casey’s impact […]