I’ve been on leave for a week. Being on leave is exactly the same as being at work except they steal time from me instead of me from them. Either way, I spend the days on matters pedagogical and the evenings animating people with cars for heads. When I have no stomach for either and the chores are done I might idle around the Apple store looking for music apps.
They’re smart those Apple people. They know that people spend more time installing and configuring software than actually using it and at a dollar an app you’ll happily keep on rearranging your icons until rigor mortis sets in. Like peanuts. Eat one. Eat another. Eat another…
Since last I confessed, I have procured:
Emergence. They have the pretty pictures down, but no idea about music. It’s like they have heard Bloom through the phone speaker and never realised that there was a background accompaniment created in response to the foreground sounds. So you get the looped notes but nothing that supports them in a spatial mix. Adding different instruments like piano and bird samples does give you more variety but without a bed it’s scattered gunfire. As I said the pictures are nice – somewhere between Kandinsky and the random monster avatars in Wordpress. You can pan and zoom them. That doesn’t do anything sonically though.
Bebot earns great popularity. It features an animated singing 50’s robot on a touch surface with which you can doodle polyphonic musical phrases. (People who do not like singing robots are few, and not deserving of such pleasure). The sparse controls available are chosen well – it’s very easy to patch a theremin or a lead guitar in less than a minute and then get riffing. You have choice of waveform, some filtration, some effects and a tone grid if desired.Very simple, very effective.
Megasynth. Only bought this while waiting for Noise.io to be upgraded to work on the new OS3. (Apple took a month to approve the upgrade which must have been just great for the developer’s income). Three oscillators with standard waveforms, standard filters, standard damn everything… with which you can make very standard synthesiser sounds. To their credit it is polyphonic, although that taxes the phone to near collapse and there seems to be some filter stealing going on. The keyboard sucks – I mean any keyboard on a telephone is going to be misery for music but they seem to have made it more so by requiring you to tap the screen glass without being able to slide around like most apps. Not a favourite.
Euphonics. Maybe I should have given this a bit more time but the demo just made me think of those organs that used to have keys that lit up to show which note to play next. They were called Thomas Color-glo Organs. That’s kind of kinky. www.frozenape.com
RJDJ. Now here is another complex one and probably best explained by the video. In trying to popularise the idea they have to certain extent mystified it for professionals – a musician creates a patch in Pure Data and then conforms it for the RJDJ application. The patch when run by the app is called a ’song’, the Reality Jockey people bundle these songs up into ‘albums’ that they sell.
By aligning PD with a mobile device they’ve moved the venue for algorithmic sound out of the concert hall and into the everyday, which is quite an achievement. Instead of watching a performer leaning over a laptop, the audience can explore the process themselves. It demystifies the format and must be quite threatening to people who pull faces while they move MIDI sliders. This was the conversation I wanted to start at the Sound Art conference the other week – instead I got to talk about it at a youth meeting at a local pop record label. Shouldn’t be surprised.
Soundgrid is another limited Tenori On clone. This one has 8 layers of sounds drawn from a “sound pack”. To vary the sounds played was my desire – yet these are not the sounds I would use (drumkit!?) and we’ve lost some of the good features from other clones. It’s a first version so I am hopeful of boundless incoming joy. But I wish somebody would actually investigate a real Tenori On to understand it does more than just one thing. Or port Electroplankton to the phone. Please.
Balls. Why say more? http://iotic.com/ I approve of this product.
Synthpond. Again a video is more useful than my blather. This is a really well thought out use of the phone in that it works with the surface not against it. Very simple rules lead to complex results and you can get past the learning curve and into nuances very quickly. I suppose my only gripe is there is a sound that is starting to get on my nerves – a polite rounded electric piano / soft bell sound that almost every toy from Bloom to Synthpond uses so as not to distract from the process. Let’s move on from it guys – it’s becoming the new cowbell.
That’s a pretty fine palette. Even though people have been fooling with mobile phones for a while now (Hello Thomas Dolby, does anyone still license Beatnik?) there’s a state change afoot. You know, like when everyone got their own video camera. Plenty of rubbish but the potential for PD to become the new handbag is a stirring idea.
Past midnight, leave is over. Back to work.