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 […]

Old technology can take on new meaning, once injected with the intelligence of today’s software. And so it is that the plotter – the specialist printing gear invented in a decade past – is being given a new lease on life. With computer vision software, the free and open source OpenCV library, and the free, […]

Making your own instruments may not be for everyone, but getting to witness the bleeding edge of musical DIY can give real insight into how electronic music performance can work, and what matters in sound. Last week, the famous sound research center in Amsterdam STEIM generously hosted an edition of Handmade Music, inviting inventors to […]

DMX (aka DMX512) is the lingua franca for lighting that MIDI is for music. (It even has a number of similarities to MIDI, and as with MIDI, I do hope eventually we’ll see more intelligent networked devices – but, for now, it’s what you use.) The folks at Synthe-FX have developed a mobile app with […]

Computers can have longevity as musical instruments, but it takes a little extra effort. (CC-BY-NC-SA) Bill Van Loo. Computers and computer software can have as much or even more longevity than traditional music hardware – that is, if elements like copy protection don’t intervene first. As a postscript to the discussion last week, prompted by […]

Pay attention, kids. This is a real computer. (Oh, yes, and if there weren’t already enough computing geek cred in this shot, check the Amiga developer poster on the wall.) Photo (CC-BY) Blake Patterson of ByteCellar.com. iPad, wha? How about new music creation software for the Apple II platform? 8-bit weapon has a new instrument […]

The elegant patterns of a circuit board, as photographed by / (CC-BY) Last week, what was intended to be a day of posts wound up being several days of updates on events centered around music technology and DIY creation. Here’s a birds-eye view of what we covered, some of the events you can catch in […]