Before Microsoft made Kinect’s 3D-sensing, skeletal-tracking “natural interaction” a console tech, it got its start via maker PrimeSense on the PC. Ironically, efforts by hackers to do amazing things with Kinect may be part of what has given Kinect traction – certainly, launch titles were extremely limited. Now, the same natural interaction looks to come […]

Strings of numbers are everywhere in our world, tucked just outside our awareness alongside identifiers like bar codes. Dutch media artist and inventor Leo van der Veen simply plucks that information and brings it to the fore. Barcodas is a barcode-scanning iPhone app that deciphers common EAN and UPC codes and translates them into musical […]

Why shouldn’t a digital download be better, not worse, than a CD release? Sit in a studio as most of your favorite albums are recorded, mixed, and mastered, and odds are the digital material is being recorded at higher bit depths and sample rates. And while the perceptual record is more mixed, there’s also no […]

There’s a special kind of genius that makes you transform any game system into a live visual tool. Whatever that force is, it’s strong with pikilipita. He’s build VJ software for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Park GP2X as well as the PlayStation 2, all released free. Now, he adopts the Korean game […]

There’s a special kind of genius that makes you transform any game system into a live visual tool. Whatever that force is, it’s strong with pikilipita. He’s build VJ software for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance and Game Park GP2X as well as the PlayStation 2, all released free. Now, he adopts the Korean game […]

Ready to cut the cord and go wireless? With mobile gadgets getting involved in music-making, it seems a logical solution – maybe not reason to throw away your MIDI cabling, but worth at least trying. Bluetooth could be an answer. In fact, it could work even without all those pesky, pricey mobile tablets and phones […]

Luz is a promising, surprisingly-powerful tool with a clean UI that lets you connect a huge range of inputs and generate visuals. It’s fully free and open source on Linux – possibly reason to try a Linux dual-boot for experimentation, even if you’re not a regular user. And now, a new release adds DMX support. […]

Despite being a musical technology enthusiast, I really do think of my Android phone first and foremost as a communications device. I imagine I’m not alone, just as I’d guess that people who want a mobile music maker may look first at the iPhone. But that raises the question, are there tools you’d install on […]

We live in three-dimensional worlds, and physically we can move easily through 3D space. But mapping our intuitive sense of space, movement, and position to the computer is a massive challenge. Our interfaces are primarily two-dimensional, and even the three-dimensional interfaces may lack the kind of sense of space that comes naturally to a child. […]

To celebrate what in the US we call 3.14 or PI day, today I’m offering stories that deal with mathematics and circles. First up, an app named for the great philosopher who is credited – even if perhaps ahistorically so – with finding that ratio and ratios in harmonies. Technology has long introduced innovations that […]