The Music Technology Magazine
Livecoding, generative and visual music, audio-reactive visuals, synths, and the software behind live performance.
GEMA's CEO called it "a verdict of global significance." A German court has decided that an AI music company training in the US still needs a European licence when the model lands in Europe — and Suno is appealing.
Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie set out to synthesize the complexity of real instruments, couldn't do it, and did something stranger instead: recorded the real instruments and played them back from a keyboard. Everything since is downstream of that.
Chase Bliss's Mood turned a guitar signal into a self-sampling ambient machine. Bad Mood does the same thing badly on purpose — broken repeats, a shortwave-radio looper, and a saturation stage called Glue holding it together.
Reaktor lets you build instruments. Karst, from musician-developer Tim Exile, wants you to build a song. It runs in a browser, patches itself unless you tell it otherwise, and adds new machines every week.
The question hanging over every AI music tool — can you train on copyrighted songs without permission? — gets one of its first real answers July 31, when a Munich court rules in GEMA's case against Suno.
Full Bucket Music has quietly built a catalog of faithful vintage-synth emulations that cost nothing. Its next one, FB3, revives the Kawai K3 — a cult 1980s hybrid whose digital oscillators fed an analog filter.
Is that song made by a machine or a musician? The recording industry's answer is a two-tier label — 'AI-Generated' vs 'AI-Assisted' — stamped in a track's metadata. It's voluntary, but it's the first real attempt at a global standard.
Type a song title, and Wario Synth pulls its MIDI and plays it back as if a Game Boy were performing it — four-channel 8-bit chiptune, generated live in your browser. It's free, open source, and gleefully pointless in the best way.
The Yamaha CS-80 is a five-figure holy grail. Behringer is teasing a $99 mini that chases its analog voice — with a motion sequencer and 3-note paraphony. It's a concept for now, but a tantalizing one.
Tweakbench made quirky, beloved plugins in the early 2000s, then vanished. Now it's back, rebuilt for modern DAWs — and its new generative instrument Tendril turns a Euclidean sequencer into ethereal, self-varying melodies for $10.
Jean-Michel Jarre helped define what a synthesizer could be. Now boutique builder SynTesla has made him a one-of-a-kind instrument to his exact spec — with a consumer version reportedly under discussion for 2027–28.
Physical modeling — synthesizing the sound of real, plucked and struck materials rather than raw waveforms — is having a moment. reFX just teased Rippler, a commercial build of a beloved free synth that briefly vanished.
The Roland Jupiter-8 is a five-figure grail synth. Behringer's JT-2 puts a single voice of that sound in a small, Eurorack-friendly box you can actually afford — and it started shipping this month.
Most AI music tools want to keep you inside their own app. Suno Studio's most useful feature is designed to get you back out of it, with material you can keep working.
The biggest barrier to livecoding was never the idea, it was the setup. Strudel is the clearest attempt yet at removing that barrier entirely.