For many musical artists, the frontier of reactive, interactive music has been a long time coming. RjDj, an app which we first saw as a series of interactive musical scenes on the iPhone, is now being expanded by its developers into a mini-ecosystem of interactive music tools for creation and distribution. I don’t think it’s […]

I enjoy a little April Foolery now and then – see Google.com at the moment. But I had a funny revelation about some of the April Fools’ jokes out there today: they could be real. Some even already are. For starters, consider the EyeDJ. The video is hilarious, a spot-on parody of the hype level […]

For all the hype around mobile music creation, here’s a story with an ending in the opposite direction. Independent developer Olivier Gillet is the reason a lot of people see handheld gadgets as potential music making devices; he’s the creator of the brilliant Bhajis Loops for Palm. But, as if to prove that hardware can […]

The folks at Miro have a handy tool for fool-proof, dummy-friendly video conversion for mobile devices. Drop nearly any file, and it converts to MP4, OGG Theora, or specific presets for devices from the TMobile G1 to the iPod – and even FLV. It’s available for Mac and Windows only, not Linux. I imagine that’s […]

Ready for some blue-sky, 35,000-foot-altitude thinking? Photo (CC-BY-ND Andres Rueda. Want a flying car? Dream of the flying car. Build the flying car. A competition I’m hosting with Digitópia, the musical-technological community of Porto, Portugal, extends to readers worldwide a challenge to dream up the digital musical instrument/interface/creation you want. Got something practical you wish […]

Spin the wheel, get an app! The Adobe wheel of icons, as realized (CC-BY) Charles Williams. When Adobe announced 64-bit After Effects in the fall, they listed a number of benefits users would reap from the transition: Performance for high-resolution formats, like working with 4K images from the RED camera. (They even went so far […]

Every so often, I’m reminded of a simple fact: the greatest machine on the planet remains the human machine. So, yes, it may seem strange to one of the uninitiated to imagine strapping an iPhone to your wrist. And yes, musicianship in the digital age is partly about triggering, not just playing (though Onyx can […]

Connecting stuff is one of the things musicians naturally do with gear. So, there’s really no reason that musical gear shouldn’t network as easily as Web servers. And yet a basic protocol, built largely on existing standards, meets with responses like this: “We’ll support OSC when there’s hardware out there.” “Name one piece of hardware […]

You’ve found a cool effect. It makes use of your GPU. Why shouldn’t it work in more than one place? And why shouldn’t you be able to easily port standard-format effects in code-for-artists environments like OpenFrameworks and Processing? With a new plug-in pack and further progress on development, FreeFrameGL promises finally to deliver on just […]