Part of the beauty of the iPhone from its launch date was the notion of a Mac you could fit in the palm of your hand. That makes it ironic that, for so many developers, mobile platforms in general have turned into a way to fragment software, to make it run fewer places instead of more. There’s something to be said for designing to a specific mobile device, but on the other hand, how many developers would want to restrict where their creations run? And particularly in music, isn’t the appeal of mobile creation the ability to have your tools work in more places? Maybe targeting just one gadget is the right choice for a given tool, but it shouldn’t be the only choice.

On the iPhone, the application Thump has plenty in common with a range of mobile music making tools. It’s simple but fun, a groove box with sequencing, subtractive synths, drums, and a set of basic effects, plus the ability to load your own samples and export songs.

Thump also demonstrates how simplifying sonic capabilities can produce musically-beautiful results, by focusing on the essentials and creating something with personality. Here’s a track by its creator showing off its sounds:
thump soundreel by mazbox

Well worth checking out the app on your platform of choice:
http://www.mrkbrz.com/thump/

What might not be immediately apparent is that under the hood, Thump makes use of the open source environment openFrameworks. As a result, the same code runs on iPhone, Mac, and Windows, as well as Linux. (It’s not distributed for Linux, but it could be. Hint, hint.) Creator Marek Bereza gives back, too – he ported the openFrameworks audio library to the iPhone, where it’s available to anyone.

Updated Marek notes in comments just what this means. The video below is, essentially, the same app. In place of the iPod screen, he has used a massive lattice of physical controls. A separate installation at the same show used a large touchscreen and simplified interface. And this really demonstrates what cross-platform means. Guy Kawasaki in the 80s mocked “ports” as a cheap wine. The idea is not to simply dump your code on a different platform and hope for the best – in fact, in this case, the changes from one platform to another were radical. The key is maximizing what’s essential, what really is not specific to a single device.

Physical Sequencer from Marek Bereza on Vimeo.

Creative Applications has a detailed write-up of the installation with more documentation.

If you’re interested in creating your own projects, oF has an elegant syntax based on Processing, but adapted to C/C++ coding paradigms and libraries.

The novelty of the iPhone or [your favorite device here] may fade. But part of what matters in mobile design is thinking about how to create interfaces and uses that can scale to the size of your palm. That can mean embracing radical simplicity, and reducing an interactive, digital musical object down to its essential noise-making functions. In acoustic instrument design, that means economizing sound production in a form. In the digital world, it means finding the interactive role you’d want to bring with you onstage, in the length roughly equivalent your fingertips to your wrist.

I’m a few weeks overdue actually writing about it, but one design I really admire is Star6, developed by Jason Forrest and Agile Partners. There are no awkward, gimmicky emulations of hardware interfaces here; it’s clear this was an interface that was illustrated in two-dimensions. It has funky nerdster chic color combos, with neon pink atop wood grain. It demonstrates that, in the space of a grid, you can fit triangles. It makes use of computer wifi capability to easily load samples without mucking around with over-designed clients – or record right on the iPhone. And it’s – surprisingly – one of the few apps to make heavy use of the accelerometer, which means rather than looking like you’re trying to text message someone, you can move it around. There’s a “grain” mode so that you can randomize sounds and not have everything synced all the time. I also enjoy the “reset” button. These are all design decisions that could make sense in more commercial software – and our own home-brewed Max/Pd patches and such, too.

Apparently Agile Partners were also influenced by the brightly-colored, handheld fun of the Buddha Machine, too; see their interview with the creator.

Star6
A lovely lineup of free samples, including the Buddha Machine

It’s not a perfect app (no mobile app really can be – that’s the fun of it), and it doesn’t do everything, but I find Star6’s personality rather irresistible. The real test of all of this is whether you can use it in real music-making. And, while my inbox is full of cheezy bands trying to ride the iPhone wave, I love the offbeat Star6 music launch party from Berlin, as documented in the video below. It ranges from Jason’s own work to Warp Records artist Jackson and ex-Chicks on Speed Kiki Moorse. And there’s a crazy iPhone + banjo + accordion cover of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” There are even some genuinely experimental sounds – not the sort of thing you’d expect at a launch event, sadly. (I wish we could have more of that.)

An Evening With Star6 – Berlin (Compilation) from Star6 on Vimeo.

More on the artists, and some of Star6 creator Jason Forrest’s own unique work:

LaDiDa Demo from khush on Vimeo.

There’s no question iPhone/iPod touch development – really, just clever mobile development – has gotten a bit overhyped lately. But that’s all the more reason to do a round-up of genuinely interesting stories, real innovation happening on the platform. So, I’m clearing out my inbox with some of the more creative tools appearing recently on Apple’s mobile gadgets. There’s no better way to kick off today’s festivities than with this unusual “reverse karaoke” creation.

Sure, people may think they’re tone-deaf. But even the layperson has extraordinary powers of musical perception. So how could you train your iPhone to perceive and respond to music? That’s the question asked by LaDiDa for iPhone, the first of a new line of “intelligent” music applications for mobile devices. A “reverse karaoke” tool, the idea is to listen to singing and fake accompaniment, rather than having you sing along to canned backing tracks. Nothing is pre-programmed; everything is generated on the fly on the device.

It’ll even make up a Bollywood accompaniment to your singing:

LaDiDa Bollywood Duet from khush on Vimeo.

Of course, to me, it’s interesting not only what the iPhone is able to musically, but also what these algorithms are unable to make sound musical. Both reveal a whole lot about how we hear and conceptualize music. I think the team deserves real credit for making this fun, though, and on constrained hardware.

The app’s creator Khush follows in the footsteps of Smule in that it takes hard-core academic music research and uses mobile devices as a vessel for getting that tech in the hands (literally) of the general public. (See my interview with Smule founder and ChucK originator Dr. Ge Wang.)

Parag Chordia, developed at professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the gentleman you see in the video, spoke to CDM about what’s happening behind the scenes. He tells us about how this application was developed, and how the intelligent algorithms work (or at least try to work, as music analysis and auto-accompaniment remain at early stages).

First, an explanation of the app.

Austrian Composer Peter Ablinger has transformed a child speaking so that it can be played as MIDI events on a mechanically-controlled piano, making the piano a kind of speech speaker. Via Matrixsynth, the readers at Hack a Day get fairly involved with how this may be working.

It seems not quite accurate to describe this as vocoding in the strictest sense, so much as a simple transformation to a (much) lower frequency resolution – that is, the 88 keys of the piano. Ablinger, for his part, describes the events as “pixels.” It’s pretty extraordinary that without a bandpass filter, you get something approximating the noisy sibilance of the speech, but this seems to be the result of having lots of events (that is, lots of resolution in terms of time). Edit: Listening again, the short answer to how you can hear so much of the voice through the piano seems to be, you can’t; the original is almost certainly mixed in. It’s nonetheless an interesting effect, and I’d like to hear the piano on its own. In other words, the basic process is, 1) convert the sound spectrum of the recorded voice to a series of MIDI events, and 2) play back the translated MIDI file. You can see that the MIDI playback is accomplished with Pd (Pure Data) running on a Windows Linux/KDE netbook, though it’s not clear what was used to do the original conversion. (The screen shot with side-by-side audio and MIDI appears as though it may be for demonstration purposes, only.)

Correction: The work is absolutely done in custom software developed by the composer in Pd (Pure Data). It’s an ideal tool for the job, and free and open source. I wouldn’t dare try to replicate the results here, but this is fantastic inspiration for playing with sound in Pd.

One Windows tool that’s capable of the job is TS Audiotomidi, as observed by Hack a Day spacecoyote. Whether or not that’s what’s at work here – and it may well be – that utility is itself interesting. Edit: Yeah, far more likely the whole thing was done in Pd. And Pd should be up to the task.

TS-AudioToMIDI

Of course, this is to say nothing of the lovely work done on the mechanical piano. It’s a beautiful piece. Here’s hoping some government bureaucrats got the message of the declaration. Now, we just need a chorus of something really loud – say a thousand trumpets – shouting out the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Seeing a tracker interface for the first time can be intimidating. But dive in a bit deeper, and you’ll discover what’s actually a very efficient interface for programming in musical sequences and working with samples. With just ten days left in the Renoise – Indamixx music production contest, there’s still time to get up and running using even the demo version of Renoise (into which you can import samples). And this could be a great excuse to learn a new tool.

Dac, who’s a big part of support and community for Renoise, has put together a nice tutorial showing off the workflow in the tool. It’s nothing all that unusual: bring in samples, assemble patterns, make music. Some of the voice over is hard to hear, but this is a good start. Now, I still like reading and writing better than video just in terms of how I learn, so I may try to work on a written version for the end of the week; feel free to shout encouragement.

For more Renoise inspiration, forum regular djnick sends along a PsyTrance video made in Renoise – so, yes, you can make PsyTrance with a tracker, too, if you like. He samples Peter Jennings talking about ecstasy. Yeah, whatever – as if you can make Peter Jennings any more trippy. Watching Jennings is the ultimate natural high.