Future Technologies

Polarization Express 

By Scott Wilkinson

Electronic Musician discusses photonics, which carries and processes information using light instead of electric current....

Air-Guitar Hero 

By Scott Wilkinson

Textile-based sensors bring the air guitar to life....

Light Mic 

By Scott Wilkinson

Microphones are among the most mature devices in the electronic musician's toolbox, and they all work according to the same principle: sound waves impinge...

Gather Round the reacTable 

By Scott Wilkinson

Most musical instruments, electronic or otherwise, are designed to be played by one person. If you bring several individuals and their instruments together,...

2 Will Get You 7.1 

By Scott Wilkinson

Surround sound is one of the biggest advances to have been made in audio reproduction for quite some time. But what about all the existing 2-channel content?...

QuIET Please 

By Scott Wilkinson

As most tech-savvy folks know, the ongoing shrinkage of electronic components cannot continue forever. At some point, conventional transistors will succumb...

Mind Reader 

By Scott Wilkinson

Mobile music players such as the Apple iPod have changed the face of our industry for good or ill, depending on who you talk to. But one thing's for sure...

Protein Storage 

By Scott Wilkinson

You might be aware of the war now raging in consumer electronics between the HD DVD and Blu-ray formats to become the next-generation optical disc for...

Speed Demon 

By Scott Wilkinson

With microprocessor clock speeds now in excess of 3 GHz, what can we expect in the future? Once again, IBM is leading the way. In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the company has demonstrated a prototype silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor...

Spiked Punch 

By Scott Wilkinson

Data compression is a huge boon to the audio industry. MP3, for example, revolutionized music distribution, and Dolby Digital and DTS allowed 5.1-channel...

Insane in the Membrane 

By Scott Wilkinson

Speakers haven't changed much over the past few decades, and speaker technology is one of the most mature and stable technologies available to the electronic...

Nanoprocessors 

By Scott Wilkinson

It is well known that to make integrated circuits faster and more powerful, the individual elements within them must be made smaller, leading Intel cofounder...

Catching the Sun 

By Scott Wilkinson

No matter what type of technology they use, all electronic musicians depend on one thing: electric power. That power comes mostly from burning fossil...

Synesthis 

By Scott Wilkinson

One of the most fascinating anomalies of human perception is a phenomenon called synesthesia, a word derived from the Greek for joined sensation. For...

Transistorless Computing 

A lot of information about computational nanotechnology has appeared on my desktop in recent months, some of which could be relevant to electronic musicians in the future....

Musical Profiling 

By Scott Wilkinson

Online technology is uniquely suited to help new artists gain an audience, thanks to music-recommendation services offered by the likes of Amazon, iTunes,...

Blast from the Past 

By Scott Wilkinson

As the saying goes, anyone who can remember the '60s probably wasn't there. I don't remember much from that era (which means I must have been there!),...

It's All in Your Head 

By Scott Wilkinson

Surround sound is becoming increasingly important for electronic musicians of all sorts. Movie and game soundtracks are routinely mixed in 5.1 surround,...

Something Old, Something New 

By Scott Wilkinson

Loudspeaker systems have used cone and dome transducers almost since their inception in the late 19th century. We've seen advances in speaker technology,...

Molecular Memory 

By Scott Wilkinson

Electronic musicians are familiar with some of the prefixes that indicate data-storage capacity. For example, the maximum amount of RAM in the original...