Alexander Chen transforms the steady pulse of the (actual) New York City subway system into gentle, generative string plucks in his new interactive piece “Conductor.” The visual effect as well as the musical one is mesmerizing, as the subway is viewed in the abstract, sparse geometries of designed Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram. New York subway […]

Galapagoose plays a Brooklyn rooftop at the monome community tour in the fall. Now he’s back to celebrate the release of new software, and meets up with artists from across the digital music-making spectrum. Handmade Music is back on the Lower East Side of Manhattan with an epic lineup spanning digital synths to monomes to […]

Touchscreens? Good, old-fashioned faders, knobs, and pads? Why not just use what suits the job – especially when you can choose both on the cheap? Nay-Seven shares some of his latest work with Usine, the brilliant, modular and touch-centric tool for Windows. It’s a futuristic rig that’s also down-to-earth. Touchscreen monitors can be had for […]

Musicians have long benefited from audio plug-ins; why not visualists and VJs? The FreeFrame plug-in format is the answer to that question, with broad support in favored visual apps like Resolue Avenue, Modul8, vvvv, Jitter, and others. All you need is some plug-in juice to feed them. Enter Marc Wren, whose new sfFreeFrame plug-in is […]

Music notation is powerful because it’s a standard. You can share it between musicians and understand what it means. What if, instead of being confined to individual, platform-specific apps, digital controls for music were the same way? We’re not just talking a MIDI message here or there, either – someone could walk in with some […]

This afternoon, I feel obligated to offer some explanation. Following my post about Julien Bayle’s LFO Everything module for Ableton Live, several readers and a forum thread on the Ableton Live forum raised concerns that a portion of Julien’s Device was adapted from another developer’s work without attribution. Heated discussion on the Live forum spilled […]

The most valuable tech is tech that lasts. And so, combining MIDI (I love the 80s!) with the iPad can make it useful as part of a “studio” setup, not just a replacement for other gear. Here’s the iPad step sequencing our MeeBlip open source synth – no need to give up knobs and tangible […]

Can minimalist controller design make even two knobs into a digital instrument? We’ll soon see. The arc, the new controller from monome designer Brian Crabtree, contains just two high-resolution encoders (known to us in everyday usage as “knobs”). It makes no sound; every minute rotation and a push-button action are telegraphed to a computer. Everything […]

Just push a little harder, each of you, and I’m sure this will work out. Photo (CC-BY) Michael Fraley. Three and two browsers / H.264, VP8 / Two sides can’t agree. Video, playing… / My Flash plugin slows, crashes. / Circular debate You could stop reading there, but by way of further explanation: Have you […]

Elliot Woods writes with an extraordinary proof of concept: it couples the depth-sensing capabilities of Microsoft’s Kinect with projection mapping to effectively “scan” a 3D scene. It’s almost Holodeck good, from the looks of the potential here. Kinect hack + projection mapping = augmented reality +hadoukens): Using the kinect camera, we scan a 3D scene […]