Motorola’s new flagship tablet. Photo courtesy Motorola. The iPad has a massive head start in software and a clear lead in design elegance, but in the tablet market, it’s no longer alone. As expected, this week’s Consumer Electronics Show brings a slew of tablets. Don’t call them iPad rip-offs, either. Given product development cycles, many […]

Photo (CC-BY) Paulo Barcelos. It’s the end of another year. And it’s time to do a proper look back at the best of visualism – the best live visual sets, the best interactive visual work, the best experimental motion, and the most significant technologies that emerged in 2010. Too often, lists of “best VJs” focus […]

Trinity Audio Group and creative director Ronald Stewart have pushed the idea of a mobile music tablet since around 2005. I first saw what they were working on in the summer of 2006, as they readied a dedicated mobile DAW. But, at least from my vantage point, it’s really taken until now for some of […]

HC Gilje’s “conversations with spaces” research and work is an effort to blur the line between digital imagery and the surfaces on which it’s projected. But rather than just make this a solo endeavor, HC shares his Max/MSP-Jitter-based tools for Mac and Windows with the larger community, free. Using the model of sources, layers, mixers, […]

MIDI in Ardour – and now, Ardour suddenly becomes viable for a wide swath of users. If a free and open source DAW sounds like a tall order, it is. And so it’s little surprise that Ardour 3, the biggest upgrade to this solid music production workstation, has been a long time coming. What might […]

Retro chip music appeal and the occasional Super Mario Bros. game aside, you probably think of the Nintendo NES and Famicom system as something collecting dust at garage sales. You probably don’t think of this NES running as a self-contained music production workstation, syncing to MIDI and Android, or exploiting new software for producing elaborate […]

Photo (CC-BY) JD Hancock. We users may sometimes gripe, but music technology gives us an impossibly wide variety for which to be thankful. From free (as in beer, as in freedom) to high-end and spendy, from software plug-in to acoustic instrument to solid-state electronics to toy, you’d run out of time and money long before […]

Kinect Test @ /// Lazercrunk from /// *** this.riley *** \ on Vimeo. Spotted: Our friend Riley Harmon, experimenting with Kinect as a live performance tool in Pittsburgh, in what I expect will be the first of many such performances coming around the world. playing around testing the kinect @ brillobox pittsburgh Openframeworks.cc tuio.org/​ osculator.net/​ […]

Therenect – Kinect Theremin from Martin Kaltenbrunner on Vimeo. Who says technology has to move fast and die young? Leon Theremin may have been a full century ahead of his time, before computers, before transistors, before jet engines or atomic power or rockets. ReacTable creator Martin Kaltenbrunner has a virtual Theremin prototype built with Microsoft’s […]

X Racer from Gadget Gangster on Vimeo. The Propeller Platform is open-source hardware with a mighty 8-core Parallax Propeller chip as its brain. Like the Arduino, it comes as a simple protoboard. But unlike the Arduino, the Propeller board is loaded with I/O pins and can output video and audio without much modification. It also […]