Supposedly this computer and the idea of a QWERTY keyboard are dead, but you may have to pry them each out of someone’s cold, dead fingers in order to get them back. Photo (CC-BY) Tobias Carlsson. The question of whether there will ever be any music apps for any non-iOS mobile platform is apparently bothering […]

Teaching has its moments of reward and frustration in equal measure, but I’m of the belief that there are no limits to the new ideas that can grow out of groups of engaged students. In fact, it’s often in the first draft, the first experiment, the first time a student has tried something that I […]

Shared dreams, indeed: welcome to Hollywood. And in 2011, the music and soundscapes of blockbuster films suddenly seem very much like the future of our dreams, from ground-breaking surround sound to interactive music to scores combining low-fidelity and high – and one breaktakingly-terrific score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that stands on its own. […]

What happens when you unleash a $140 or less, open source, monophonic, hackable synth with a funny name into the world? We’ve found out, and thanks to inventive users, it’s quite nice. Photo by Iain Browne, who also has a hilarious Tumblr. We introduced the MeeBlip, an open source, hackable synthesizer, back in early November. […]

I’m Superman! Uh… yeah, so there is some appeal to gestural interfaces for 3D navigation, I meant to say. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Open Exhibits; see note below. The absence of an official SDK has hardly discouraged experimentation and innovation with Microsoft’s depth-sensing camera for the Xbox 360. But Microsoft, via their research and strategy officer Craig […]

A helmet and hand units make up the TRON performance system for a style of music artist Onyx Ashanti calls “beatjazz.” And he’s well on his way to making a reality. All images courtesy the artist. Onyx Ashanti is insane – in the special, essential way that makes certain brilliant musicians. An experienced busker, having […]

Max for Live, in action: a graphical programming environment inside Ableton Live. Photo (CC-BY-ND) akihiko.japan Max for Live, now into its second year, is a tool with an ambitious goal: take the custom music software creation, visual-patch-programming powers of Max/MSP, and put them inside live performance and production host Ableton Live. It’s not the only […]

On Create Digital Music, amidst lots of hacks for listening and creation at the Music Hack Day here in New York, two teams focused on Kinect. Those creative instruments easily stole the show from more conventional social music tools. At top, Stringer, a simulated instrument that uses Kinect for input; at bottom, Bionic DJ, a […]

Harrison is a company with a rich legacy in high-end consoles. Mixbus, their software product, is something of an anomaly. Its analog tape saturation, EQ, filter, compression, and mixing should be sold a la carte for a few hundred bucks each, given the usual business model in this industry. The product should run on some […]

The Gallolizer is a handmade multi-effects sound mangler, an array of dirty, delicious sound-destroying effects in a single handcrafted box. It’s the work of a Spanish engineering and art collective called MP19, an Arduino-loving, free software-using, open source group of artists who turn those platforms into the kind of grungy sounds that make them happy. […]