Microsoft’s Kinect proved that real people are actually interested in moving their bodies to motion-control stuff on a screen. Leap Motion, whose $70 motion detector is decoupled from a gaming console, could end up having a wider impact. It’s not just for gamers, and desktop and laptop manufacturers are reportedly looking at integrating Leap into…
Spacemen 3 released an album in 1994 called Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To, which you can hear on YouTube, if you use it like a music service. In similarly recursive fashion, a new iOS app called Crossfader Move & Mix (free for now) lets you dance to remix music to dance to….
The legendary electronica label Ninja Tune has done what many have contemplated, but no one has crushed: It launched an app, Ninja Jamm, that lets anyone remix music with (relative) ease, using a variety of high-quality releases from world-renowned DJs, producers, and other artists. If this doesn’t start you remixing music, nothing will. By simply downloading this…
Machines understand music, in some cases, well enough to remix it. One of the most effective, and in some cases jaw-droppingly beautiful effects is a simple matter of slowing down a song’s speed, or tempo, while leaving its pitch, or note frequencies, intact. After spotting yet another new one this morning, we couldn’t help but…
Forever.fm was designed to do one thing and one thing only: Play music that never stops, for any “DJ chatter,” advertisement, or lack of musical ideas. This impressive-looking, open-source web app features both circular and linear waveform animations. For music, it pulls the top 200 tracks from SoundCloud, then beatmatches the the transitions between each…
Guitar virtuoso Ron Jarzombek shreds way hard on his new song, “Beyond Life and Cosmic Kinetics, which is great, but that’s not what attracted our attention. Jarzombek tapped iOS developer Oleg Kolokolov to turn his song into an advanced, well-designed song app that lets the listener adjust the levels — or mute entirely — each of the tracks,…
If you haven’t heard of Reactable yet, basically, it’s a lit-up musical table interface upon which you can place physical objects and manipulate them in order to create and remix music. As you might suspect, there is an app version ($10, iOS or Android) — but that is not what concerns us here, at least…
Scottish DJ, producer, and recording artist Calvin Harris and his people released an intriguing new app today that includes his entire album, for free, but there’s a catch. You can only hear it if you keep dancing; in order to hear it in other circumstances, his fans will need to buy the actual album. 18…
Launched four years ago, RJDJ is one of the most innovative music apps ever, for the way it used the microphone on your iPhone (or, better yet, the one on your headphone cable) to grab snippets of sound from the outside world and weave those into intelligently-generated musical “scenes,” which rotated between motifs and elements….
One of the neatest aspects of last week’s DUMBO Summer Friday festival was that it put music app developers on the same stage (or near it) as the musicians. One presentation in particular combined elements of both app-building and live performance: Bangarang Boomerang, a robust, grid-like web app that lets you manipulate Skrillex’s dubset masterpiece, “Bangarang.”…
Passion Pit struck upon an intriguing way to promote its critically-acclaimed new album, Gossamer, while giving fans new ways to enjoy some of its music: the Gossamer iOS app. This two-song app was created by music app visionary Scott Snibbe, the same man who helped Björk blow everyone’s mind with her Biophilia app album. Passion Pit:…
The feeling of déjà vu that accompanies the recognition of a musical sample is uniquely compelling: You’re hearing something that’s at once familiar and completely new. If you’re anything like me, you’ll immediately start reaching into the filing cabinet of your memory, trying to piece together where you first heard that fragment of sound. Perhaps you’re a…
In Las Vegas at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2008, I spotted an interesting piece of hardware called Pacemaker, featuring two circular controls for remixing and DJing music, with the option to add all sorts of effects, and generally tweak the sound. In that video, which I posted on Wired.com back then (note: I only…
The 2012 London Summer Olympics is just around the corner, and advertisers are already using the occasion to try to move product. There will always be a certain irony in cigarette companies sponsoring tennis tournaments or purveyors of sugar water sponsoring the Olympics — especially when “Americans are drinking themselves fat,” in the words of New…
The Incredible Polo, which appears to be an all-vocals, one-man band in the style of Bobby McFerrin, struck upon an innovative approach to promote its new release: a web app that lets you remix its song by dragging and dropping melodies, effects, beats, voices and choruses onto a bunch of animated versions of the artist…
