On Jan. 7, the police cordoned off the streets. The auditorium’s ventilation and elevators were turned off. Every light bulb in the concert hall was unscrewed to eliminate a faint buzzing sound.

Upstairs in the museum, Mr. Cacciatori put on a pair of velvet gloves and took a 1615 Amati viola from its glass display case. He inspected it thoroughly, and then a security guard escorted him and the instrument down two flight of stairs to the auditorium.

The curator handed the instrument to Wim Janssen, a Dutch viola player, who walked to the center of the stage.

Axiom is an extremely flexible node-based realtime audio synthesizer. It was originally designed for size-constrained environments such as PC intros in the demoscene, but is entirely open source and is becoming an excellent free tool for any musician.

Features:

• Musician-friendly (ie knobs and sliders) interface
• Highly customizable and flexible through a node editor and custom scripting language, named Maxim
• Export to replayer with no dependencies (not even the standard library)
• Use any DAW with VSTi support for note editing and automation

Focused on high-quality sound processing and a highly usable interface Calf studio gear is designed to give you a professional production environment for your open source operating system.

Play your SF2 sample banks, create filthy organs, fatten your sounds with phasers, delays, reverbs and other FX, process your recordings with gates, compressors, deesser and finally master your stuff with multiband dynamics - for free!

Neat free opensource audio tools for Linux.

KXStudio is a collection of applications and plugins for professional audio production. KXStudio provides Debian and Ubuntu compatible repositories and its own Linux Distribution currently based on Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS.

Helm is a free, cross-platform, polyphonic synthesizer that runs on GNU/Linux, Mac, and Windows as a standalone program and as a LV2/VST/AU/AAX plugin. Release is in beta so there are outstanding bugs.

In this article we'll explore a neat way of visualizing your MP3 music collection. The end result will be a hexagonal map of all your songs, with similar sounding tracks located next to each other. The color of different regions corresponds to different genres of music (e.g. classical, hip hop, hard rock). As an example, here's a map of three albums from my music collection: Paganini's Violin Caprices, Eminem's The Eminem Show, and Coldplay's X&Y.

This web app lets you upload a favorite MP3 and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. Infinite Jukebox uses the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats. It plays the song beat by beat, but at every beat there's a chance that it will jump to a different part of song that happens to sound very similar to the current beat. For beat similarity the uses pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and the position of the beat within a bar. There's a nifty visualization that shows all the possible transitions that can occur at any beat. Built at Music Hack Day Boston 2012.

The integers are a unique factorization domain, so we can’t tune pianos. That is the saddest thing I know about the integers.

I talked to a Girl Scout troop about math earlier this month, and one of our topics was the intersection of math and music. I chose the way we perceive ratios of sound wave frequencies as intervals. We interpret frequencies that have the ratio 2:1 as octaves. (Larger frequencies sound higher.) We interpret frequencies that have the ratio 3:2 as perfect fifths. And sadly, I had to break it to the girls that these two facts mean that no piano is in tune. In other words, you can tuna fish, but you can’t tune a piano.

In a ruling by United States District Judge Thomas P. Griesa in the United States District Court in Manhattan, Grooveshark parent company Escape Media and two of the company’s top executives were found liable for infringing the rights of the labels on a grand scale.

So, sadly, this may spell the end of Grooveshark, the only music streaming service I know of that doesn't suck. Bummer.