A sculptor I know likes to say, "Art is a hammer knocking at your eyeballs." Architect Robert Venturi described one of his approaches as "contradiction juxtaposed." Amy X Neuburg, here live at EXIT Theatre, juxtaposes fiery operatic vocals with electronic audio loops. (Photo by Rob Thomas) Much successful art, it seems to me, takes concepts—or symbols of concepts—and squishes them...

Here's the wackiest warning sticker I've ever seen on a musical instrument. What's stranger is it was from a keyboard designed for little kids! The image below is a scan of the sticker laid on top of a photo from the company's website. Insert your punchline here.......

I saw a bunch of wacky MIDI controllers at the recent Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) festival, but none as creepily expressive as the Sonic Banana: According to the inventor's site, The Sonic Banana consists of four bend sensors in a row, running the length of a rubber tube, with a pushbutton switch at the end. Software in...

Cakewalk, one of the first music software manufacturers to achieve Windows Vista compatibility, just launched a musicians' resource site for the new OS. It explains the musical benefits, lists audio gear with Vista drivers, and features links to other sites with Vista music information. Speaking of which, be sure to check out O'Reilly's Vista site as well, where you'll find...

In retrospect, it was so easy. Last week I got a mysterious e-mail saying, Our host just had a birthday (perhaps a BIG one, I'm not sure) and was "lamenting" according to [his wife], that there was no celebration. She asked us not to bring gifts, but Chris and I have an idea: when we all sing him the surprise...

O'Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the "listen" link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher's recent blog about the Game Developers Conference: I love the Game Developer's Conference!...

In the intro to my last podcast, I listed six popular songs that use the notorious E-mu Emulator II shakuhachi sound. For fun, here are two I couldn't fit into the show itself. Tangerine Dream: Yellowstone Park (540KB MP3) Sade: Stronger Than Pride (432KB MP3) Coincidentally, I came across a bucket of real shakuhachis last week at a camping lodge....

UPDATE, 2007-09-14: Our massive H2 review is now online, and it's packed with answers to the questions you asked here. Thanks again for making this such a collaborative process. We also have a new discussion area at the end of the review, so please feel free to continue this conversation over there. Zoom finally started production of its latest handheld...

In today's O'Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. "It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had," Jochen told me. Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I've embedded it here for...

NPR did a clever demonstration on Morning Edition this week. To illustrate how much money the 2008 presidential candidates raised last quarter, the announcer played a music clip—one beat of a song for each million dollars. Of course, NPR can't show graphs on radio, but for me, the audio "visualization" was much more visceral than seeing a bar graph. One...