Incline, “toposonic corpus explorer,” transforms granular synthesis

Imagine granular synthesis, taken in entirely different dimensions. That’s Incline — Cristian Vogel’s cross-bred mixture of microsound and machine learning segmentation. It explodes sounds into a highly configurable topography, then applies precise envelopes, with unique rhythmic and textural results. Here’s how to explore those strange new worlds.

Barry Vercoe, who made coding sound accessible to all, has died

Barry Vercoe, composer and music scientist, founded MIT’s electronic music efforts and helped shape the Lab’s efforts in digital synthesis and machine listening and learning. But his biggest impact came outside the academy: as the inventor of Csound, he took the original innovations of Max Mathews and made them accessible to everyone. The live coding scene that followed has transformed the practice of coding sound into a new form of musical performance.

Peter Kirn - June 17, 2025