Gearfuse

About six months ago, I was reading up on music creation and the program Max/MSP, a graphical workflow environment for creating and manipulating audio and video. Very complex, but powerful stuff. The author of Max/MSP, Miller S. Puckette, later created a piece of similar, open-source software called Pure Data (pd). Pure Data is similar to Max/MSP except that it’s free for anyone to use and make stuff with.

In this post, we’ll go over what exactly I managed to do with PD. It involved using an M-Audio MIDI controller to manipulate videos in a real-time graphical environment. Sound too complicated or scary for you? It’s really not. C’mon, I’ll show you how it works.
(more…)

You may be used to making music with apps like GarageBand, Logic Pro and Pro Tools. But did you know, that you can use the world’s most popular photo-editing software to manipulate sound? Using a program called Photosounder, John Keston was able to save a piano recording as a bitmap image file. He then loaded it into Photoshop, added some blur and filtering and saved it. The result was an ethereal, church-like sound with his piano distorted to hell and back.

Looks like a really fun way to play around with sound. I wonder if you could use this technique for live sound manipulation a la Eclectic Method. I guess we’ll see as 2009 pushes on.

Link

The musical trio from Tokyo, Japan known as d.v.d. sound like a blast to see live. The group consists of drummers Itoken and Jimanica and visualizer Takashi Yamaguchi. As the drummers play and beat on the drums, Takashi projects and manipulates brilliant imagery on a screen. The sounds trigger geometrical shapes and landscapes via Processing (just like Metamorphosis 2), ensuring that it’s a real trip. PingMag has a fantastic interview with d.v.d. and I highly recommend you check it out.

Link

The Wiimote sensor controller might be the more fun of the two, but sometimes, you’ve just gotta whip out the classic. It has to be done. So why not add a coolness factor to the classic controller as well? This DIY will allow you to add LED lights around the sticks of the controller. Some simple hardware manipulation is required.

All you’ll need is the controller, a triwing screwdriver, wire scissors, two 3mm LEDs in your choice of color (the blue looks pretty cool), a soldering iron and solder, a glue gun, and a solid core wire. The directions look pretty straight forward with the aide of the diagrams the site has, marking the step by step instructions. Happy hacking! — Andrew Dobrow

Link