Photo via Flickr courtesy (C) MrBook aka heurtubia aka Hector Urtubia. A $50 synth that makes neat noises is fun. But a $50 synth that has a proper housing, audio jacks, and can be MIDI controlled — that’s a whole lot better. So readers were wowed last week as we saw the work MrBook did […]

Via Nat Lecude, here’s what the Fingertapps application platform looks like on Dell’s obscenely-affordable Studio One 19 desktop. (Try a whole computer with a multi-touch screen for US$849 and up.) There are a few concerns here: I’m not quite sure why there appears to be so much latency in the demo. That could have any […]

Photo of a Resolume 3 rig (CC) Retinafunk. When it comes to controlling software, let’s put it bluntly: OSC good, MIDI bad. With OSC, it’s possible to control the array of things software might do, with easy use of high-resolution data, descriptive names in plain English (or your language of choice), a path hierarchy that […]

Editing drum patterns in RjDj/Pd from Frank Barknecht on Vimeo. If making your own musical tools seems like a lot of work, you’re not wrong. The beauty of making your own stuff is all about making your own reusable modules that help you build musical solutions more quickly. Finding those useful modules can also help […]

There’s plenty of rightful skepticism about the use of mainstream displays for multitouch in general purpose computing. And why not? As a full-time replacement for other input, multitouch probably doesn’t make sense. But for music, the equation is changing. Multitouch capabilities are showing up on commodity-priced PC computers like the multi-touch enabled HP laptop models […]

ToonLoop Remix from Society for Arts and Technology on Vimeo. Yes, you read that right: realtime stop motion. While stop motion is, by definition, associated with a painstaking process of creating animation frame by frame, a free and open source tool takes a different approach. ToonLoop provides the usual stop motion tools for creating loops, […]

Okay, Google Android fans — your apps are starting to arrive, especially as Google continues to improve the SDK. First up, here’s a demo of the new app FingerPlay MIDI, which turns Android into a simple touch controller. True, we’ve seen similar things on iPhone, and Apple’s platform has precise multitouch which Android lacks, but […]

Puddle of Life – Darwin Exhibit from Tiago Serra on Vimeo. Here’s a really elegantly-designed multi-touch table. It uses two really key pieces of open source technology: the Community Core Vision (“CCV”) tracker, formerly known as tbeta, and a lovely framework for coding visuals called PyMT. PyMT, as the name implies, is a Python-based framework. […]

Fritzcrate Project / lusidLearn Early Demo from Michael Schieben on Vimeo. Knobs and faders can be rigid. Fancy multitouch devices can be expensive. But for the cost of a webcam and some spare materials, you can build computer interfaces with objects around the house, thanks to the power of open source software. In just one […]