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 […]

Photo (CC-BY-ND Dave/riptheskull. Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers. I was thinking about technologies for which I’m particularly thankful, some non-obvious, some perhaps so obvious they might be easily be taken for granted. Each I hope represents some opportunities for others. At the risk of starting a Thanksgiving roast, in no particular order, here are […]

Interactive Puppet Prototype with Xbox Kinect from Theo Watson on Vimeo. When Microsoft gobbled up vision technology and announced they were channeling their own research into a product for their game console, artists, researchers, and hackers lamented. It seemed the tech might be destined only for a handful of mainstream game titles. Hours after the […]

The Lemur, seen here onstage with The Glitch Mob, rides off into the sunset. It’s not so often that I write obituaries for hardware, but this time, it seems appropriate. JazzMutant has announced that its Lemur, the multi-touch hardware controller, is officially at the end of its life. Their announcement:

Checkerboard Step Sequencer V2 from Josh Silverman on Vimeo. Shall we play a game? Have your checkers chops ready, because Josh Silverman’s Checkerboard Step Sequencer, a tangible interface for music, will test both your game mettle and your grooves. Built with the open source coding tool OpenFrameworks and Ableton Live as sound source, the checkerboard […]

Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo. Once upon a time, we imagined a future in which computer applications shared content, media, and data effortlessly, where different tools all coexisted. The reality we got was, in almost every category, far more monolithic. By exploiting a little-known feature of the Mac’s graphics […]

What if you could make any device or any software a re-programmable musical instrument, effect, or soundmaker? Your phone could be a touch-controlled effect, your tablet a sketchpad for interactive drum sequencers. Patches assembled on your desk on a computer could be taken with you in your pocket. And what if you could do all […]