Hack a Day » createdigitalmusic

Music and visual arts at The Last HOPE

Benjamin Eckel — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 03:40:00 +0000

[Peter Kirn] from Create Digital Music has an article up highlighting many of the great music and visual performance pieces planned for The Last HOPE on Friday night. If you are around New York and not accustomed to hacking conferences, this could be a great excuse to go check it out. Here are some of our favorite projects.

In the field of visuals, [Joshue Ott] and [Ezekiel Honig] are scheduled for an exhibition. [Ott] is best known for authoring superDraw, an amazing app used for generating visuals for music. The above video shows superDraw in action. [Honig] will provide his usual brand of warm and noisy ambient soundscapes.

Representing the 8-bit scene, [Paris] (video above) and [No Carrier] are also scheduled to attend.

[Michael Una] will also be on hand to showcase his live looping and robot assisted performances. The above video shows one of the robots he will be performing with. This robot was built around the Highly Liquid MIDI kit.

Making music with the Eee PC

Eliot — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:35:00 +0000

Create Digital Music has been watching the Asus Eee PC closely. The laptop’s portable nature and low price-cheaper than a turntable-have made them desirable to both producers and performers. CDM has collected links to many people that are figuring out how to leverage the lightweight rig. [Dan Stowell] put together a tutorial for SuperCollider, the real time audio synthesis engine. The machine is good for simple text based tracker software too. On the Windows side, a lot of software, like Guitar Rig, can be enabled with just a little display driver hacking. This really makes us wonder when we’ll see the first Eee PC keytar mod.

AudioCubes by Percussa

Sean Percival — Fri, 23 May 2008 10:30:00 +0000

[Peter Nyboer] has written an extensive post about his experience with AudioCubes from Percussa. Aside from their unique glowing exterior, these cubes are an innovative way to control and even produce audio tracks. Four faces of each cube are equipped with IR sensors to detect distance and communicate with other cubes. The cubes also have USB, a rechargeable battery, and audio in/out. Moving your hands around the sensors changes the MIDI output of the cube. Changing the cubes’ orientation and distance from each other also changes the signal. Max/MSP and Live are both supported out of the box, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get started. [Peter] makes an important point: unlike traditional instruments, there’s no obvious way to get started. At 400euro for 2 cubes and 650euro for 4 cubes, these devices aren’t exactly being given away, but it’s great to see new interfaces being imagined. A video of [Peter]‘s first experiments with the cubes is embedded below; read his full post to see more footage of the cubes in action… and naturally we’d love to see any DIY versions of this you can come up with.