Technology may be about the next Big New Thing, but as with music making in general, making music with tech is for many of us a lifetime vocation. So, it’s welcome news to find that time-tested tools, maturing over decades rather than months, are enjoying greater use than ever before. We saw Pure Data (Pd) attracting new interest as the embeddable libpd version allows use in a range of development environments and mobile platforms. Now, it’s about to be Csound’s turn.

Of course, before we get to that, if you’ve got an iPad 2 or “3″ (aka “the new iPad”), you can more or less skip this entire article and start making wild new granular sounds on your tablet. (Sadly, the original iPad is excluded here because it’s a resource-intensive application, though owners of that tablet – and other mobile devices – have plenty more to anticipate in Csound world.)

csGrain is a multi-effects processor that works its sonic-mangling magic live on sound, making use of something called “SyncGrain,” a real-time granular synthesizer. You can record from a mic or import tracks from the iTunes library (including, of course, your own music), or even use an included sample loop. csGrain then processes those sounds via a rich set of sonic tools, either live or to a recording, with sharing via AudioCopy, AudioPaste, email, and Dropbox. You also get setting randomization and a range of live effects, too. If you’re unsatisfied by the “finger against bathroom mirror glass” feeling of the tablet, you can connect an external MIDI input.

And, of course, it sounds amazing:

All of that is nice enough, but the bigger news is how this is all possible – and what is yet in store. Think Csound running everywhere, including learning about the tool and coding with it directly on an iPad.

csGrain uses Csound, the composition and sound design language that traces its roots back to the first-ever digital synthesis languages developed by pioneer Max Mathews. (It’s worth noting that Max’s ideas inspired the work of Miller Puckette on Pd and Max/MSP, too, meaning these are “all in the family,” as it were. Some even argue the model had an indirect influence on modular synths.)

csGrain is the first of a series of apps using Csound, including a massive, promising, everything-you’d-ever-want-with-Csound-on-an-Ipad app, covering documentation and code. This isn’t just an attempt to “cash in” on a geeky sound tool in the midst of the App Gold Rush — far from it. The application is as much a teaching opportunity as product. You’ll be able to use the application and its documentation to learn more about the sound processing technique, and discover the Csound code that makes the app tick. For some, it could be a first introduction to Csound, without having to be enrolled in an academic class. And for developers and sound artists who do want to make their own Csound creations, an upcoming SDK will unlock the power of Csound on other platforms (iOS being just one). That brings the power of “run anywhere” portability to text-based language Csound much as libpd has done for the graphical-patching tool Pd.

This image of a developer build of Csound Touch should be enough to set Csound fans’ hearts racing. (Okay, not a huge segment of the population at large, but I’m fairly certain most of them read this site.)

Developer Dr. Richard Boulanger, who has been a driving force behind almost every element of Csound’s recent development from the stuff under the hood to the documentation and the community, is now taking that sonic energy and applying it here. (And I do mean energy: sonic whiz “Dr. B,” as he’s affectionately called by his students, practically bubbles with enthusiasm and ideas. I’ll have what he’s having.)

He tells us that even in its first day, csGrain has made a big impact – no small task for an App Store inundated with volume and an application most would consider to be pretty niche in appeal.

The launch of csGrain has been pretty exciting. At the App Store, on day one, in the Paid Music Apps Catagory, we reached the rank of #8 (out of 4000+ paid music apps). We had over 957 people view the csGrain video at the Boulanger Labs site, and we were contacted by Richard Devine and Jordan Rudess with praise, congratulations and advice. We got some pretty great reviews at the App Store such as this one…. (I have no idea who this is by the way… which makes it even cooler….

“csGrain is a must-have effects powerhouse for the iPad. The sounds, usability, and musicality of the instrument are at least on par with the Moog apps, but the the potential for extension and customization far surpasses anything else. If you want to blow your mind in two seconds flat with this app, just press and hold any of the parameters (esp the sync grain ones) and a randomization window pops up, change the parameters and get instantly out of this world sounds. I really like the integration with Dropbox and AudioPaste functionality. And while you don’t need it at first, the manual is very well written for when you want to dig deeper. My only complaint is that the app is not yet in Retina-display, but I am sure that will be coming soon. Another nice feature improvement would be to augment the midi capability, which is already awesome, to allow for automatic learning of cc messages based on input like the way Ableton Live works. All in all, this is most powerful effects application on the iPad. Good job!”

I should also direct owners of the first-generation iPad to Richard’s explanation of why you can’t have the app:

It really doesn’t work on iPad1. It’s optimized for iPad2 and the new iPad. In particular, the stereo granular processing is both efficient and amazing, but… it’s also pretty heavy for the iPad1 and we would get some
breakUps in the audio on that platform – so we just made if for the 2 and the new.

But let’s get to what’s coming next. Dr. Boulanger gives us the full scoop. I imagine him sounding like Vince, the Slap Chop guy (and with good reason):

[Last week] was the release of csGrain (one of Boulanger Labs’ focused/targeted “spin-off” apps) and there are others coming over the next few months. But Csound Touch – which is coming in about 1 month – is ALL of Csound on the iPad…

The Csound for iOS API and SDK will be offered in the next day or two with all sorts of working models…
It will blow you away… how “easy” it is to develop audio apps with Csound as the DSP engine.

our .csd files are all offered with the apps.

One will be able to incorporate Csound into their own apps, games, whatever.

csGrain is just ONE huge .csd file – running under the hood… and there is a button there to see the code and it’s in the manual that is included too.

- we are sharing many tricks right there. But there are also tons of tricks shown in all the models that come with the SDK

Csound Touch IS Csound – all of Csound – for the iPad.

It is built upon and synchronized with the latest version of Csound5

It supports the realtime “rendering” of any Csound “.csd” file.

It can render .csd files from within the Csound Touch App or from the Internet.

It includes realTime “Console Output” (for diagnostics and progress monitoring) and supports “OFFline Rendering” for the realization of the most complex and demanding of “orchestras and compositions.” (For instance, if you wanted to create a sound with ten thousand oscillators and five hundred reverbs and two thousands filters it’s not a problem. This is Csound… all of Csound… and with Csound the only limitation is your imagination!)

Csound Touch supports Realtime MIDI control of any Csound-based MIDI instrument.

Csound Touch supports Realtime iPad/GUI Control of Csound Instruments via custom OnScreen Sliders, Knobs, XY controls and a Piano Keyboard.

One can Save to Disk or Render to the speaker or any pro audio interface in RealTime or once can do both Simultaneously! Jam and Capture! Remix and Record.

Csound Touch supports Interapplication File Transfer on the iPad Import/Export via DropBox, Email and AudioCopy.

To get you started with Csound; to inspire your creative spirit; and to support your study and exploration of Computer Music Composition, Software Synthesis, Signal Processing, Algorithmic Composition, Physical Modeling, and so much more…
the Csound Touch App includes:

Chapter 1 of Boulanger’s “foundational text” published by MIT Press – The Csound Book

The “classic” Boulanger Csound “Toots” from the Csound Manual

Boulanger’s “Mastering Csound” Tutorials

and there’s more!

We include the latest Csound FLOSS Manual (and all the Floss Instruments)
We include the Canonical Csound Reference Manual (and all the Manual Instruments)

and even more….

Selections from Boulanger’s Csound Instrument Catalog (30 years of Csound Instruments)
Selected Csound Compositions from the Boulanger Collection and The Csound Mailing List

Selected Algorithmic/Generative Compositions

A diverse and useful assortment of Dr.B’s favorite DSP Instruments
A varied collection of Dr.B’s favorite MIDI Instruments

A collection of OpenSource Audio Samples from the OLPC Sound Sample Archive.

Of course, this isn’t just about iOS: Csound is now in one form another either available or coming soon to Android, Ableton Live (via Max for Live), Max/MSP, standalone desktop applications, and the Mac AudioUnit plug-in format. I agree when Richard calls it “The Csound Renaissance of 2012.”

By the way, I think Richard has given those of us working on Pd, too, a real sense of what we could do with that tool (as well as an excuse to play with Csound anew). He tells us:

PS…. The Pd Rennaissance is also very very wonderful – the new book, the new code, the new possibilities…. all extremely exciting. After reading your blog on bit ago, I ordered the book and am very inspired by this initiative as well. So…. all cool and extremely important.

I couldn’t agree more.

So, once again, the timeline for the Revolution:

Coming soon (in a month)

Csound Touch – all of Csound on the iPad! Run any opcode, run any orchestra, run any composition. Run the entire Csound Book, Csound Catalog, Csound Manual. It all works and it’s all there!

and the a few weeks after that….

More Csound Apps such as:

csSpectral – Realtime vocoding, convolution, and spectral processing.

csFuzz – a rack of guitar effects.

csVoice – a vocal synthesizer, harmonizer, processor.

csGen – algorithmic, probabilistic, and generative composition systems.

csModel – a collection of Physical and Physically Inspired Models.

csClassics – a collection of synths based on the classic techniques – FM/AM/RM/WaveShaping/Granular/Additive/Etc.

The Revolution will not be televised, but it will be at:
http://boulangerlabs.com

You can find csGrain on our exclusive, multi-platform Apps section:
csGrain @ apps.createdigitalmusic.com

An, as always, don’t miss the central repository for all things Csound:
http://www.csounds.com/

We’ll have an interview with Dr. Boulanger later this week, so if you’ve got questions for him, ask away!

We’ve got lots of other news from Messe to share soon – so don’t worry, this isn’t becoming the Propellerhead News Network. But since I’m starving and going to dinner, you can spend those 40 minutes watching the Propellerhead “keynote” press presentation I saw yesterday.

This video is for the moment the only way to really see the new iPhone app Figure, powered by Reason under the hood. Speaking of which, I have some answers to questions readers asked during our live coverage from yesterday:

Q. Will Figure be available on Android?
A. No plans at this time, no.

Q. Is the US$1 price an “intro” price? Really, only a buck?
A. It’s really only a buck, when it becomes available following Apple approval. It’s not officially an intro price, but Propellerhead also hasn’t said it’s the permanent price, so you might want to snap it up.

Q. Is there an iPad-native resolution?
A. Confirming this one. But see the demo video below… on an iPad.

Q. Will it support MIDI out?
A. Good grief, I’d be a little frustrated with Propellerhead if they added MIDI in or out to this iPhone app before we got it in Reason. (Cough. Yes, I still want that, darn it.) Anyway, short answer: no. No MIDI in, no MIDI out. MIDI out would be excellent, because it’s a pattern sequencer; maybe they can put that in a future version and I can play my MeeBlip with it. MIDI in makes less sense, because it’s really about the touch experience.

Q. There’s really Reason inside this app?
A. Yes. Ernst was very clear on this, as you can hear in the video. It’d be really great if you could somehow load racks from the desktop Reason with Figure and visa versa, but we’ll just have to get our hands on this, which should happen very soon.

Q. What does Figure actually look like?

Our friends at Sonic State shot video, so that I spend more time sitting in the sun eating brats and drinking beer. (Nick, does that mean me embedding this here counts as non-commercial usage? I’m doing it solely out of being lazy and bad at shooting video.)

Seriously, it’s a nice hands-on:

Users want more: that much is clear. But for years, Reason has famously (or infamously, depending on your point of view) resisted plug-in formats as a way of extending its production environment. At the moment, plug-ins have been dominate largely by Avid (RTAS), Apple (AU), and Steinberg (VST), as open source alternatives have failed to gain wide commercial traction. Those formats apparently didn’t make the cut with Reason.

That changed officially tonight. Reason’s rack is open to third parties, via something called Rack Extensions, previewed and available by summer for all Reason users. What you’re getting is not so much a new plug-in format as a new set of ideas about what a plug-in should be, in the form of a way of making add-ons for Reason alone.

The ability to get more out of Reason’s rack will clearly mean more for lovers of Reason, who at last will get some favorite sonic toys and tools without switching hosts. But how exactly do the specifics work? I spent some time with Ernst Nathorst-Böös, CEO of Propellerhead, as well as other developers working on the program to try to understand what it’s all about, and trying strange new green sauces known in Frankfurt. (Non mood-altering substances, mind. Just stuff you put on potatoes; don’t read too much into it. German cuisine.)

Before we get to that, though, here are two obvious take-aways for other plug-ins. To me, the benefit for the Reason community is pretty clear. But I think even for Propellerhead, the best thing that could happen here is if other plug-in formats follow the lead. Plug-in formats in general could work better than they do. It’s frustrating that they’ve made little progress since their introduction in regards to some obvious shortcomings, over a range of years. (Don’t believe me? Ask almost any plug-in developer, anywhere.) There are two obvious elements of the Propellerhead announcement that could mean something to competing plug-in formats (AU and VST in particular). Propellerhead aren’t the only ones complaining about them.

Note that given the nature of this being a fresh announcement, we haven’t yet fact-checked this with Propellerhead, and some statements here are interpretive or speculative. And, of course, some stuff is still in the works as this is developed. We’ll cover it as it evolves.

1. Plug-ins shouldn’t bring down hosts. One of the most important point Propellerhead made was widely misunderstood. The idea is this: when a plug-in crashes, the host shouldn’t crash with it. Now, the developers of Reason are obviously very proud of the stability of Reason, but that isn’t the issue here. However stable or instable your host is, the notion is that a plug-in shouldn’t be the reason that host crashes. Some effect you downloaded shouldn’t send your whole session toppling to the ground. Various forms of sandboxing can prevent this. We’ll have to test the Reason solution in practice, but in principal, I know of no reason every plug-in couldn’t support this basic notion. And even if you’ve seen Reason crash, as some commenters have said, the idea here is that a plug-in won’t be the cause.

2. Plug-in developers ought to be able to sell their stuff right in the host. This is a no-brainer. Set aside the obvious success story of Apple’s App Store on iOS and Mac. Plug-in developers have an impossible time these days just selling their work (or, indeed, even giving it away). It’s kind of bizarre that in the Internet age, no other host makes it easy to find and try out the work of other developers. (I was going to give an exception, but … there isn’t one. Seriously. What the heck?)

It’s pretty easy to make an extended argument for either of these ideas without talking about the Reason announcement. And I’m not trying to sell Reason here: believe me, I’d like to see other plug-in formats advance, too. Reason might want that, as well, since they rely on that same developer ecosystem. (Translation: they need devs making enough money to spend the time to keep making plug-ins … for anyone, not just Reason.)

As for Reason, here are some answers to frequent questions and comments from readers.

What will it cost? When can I get it? It’ll be free for existing Reason users, available by end of Q2 (beginning of summer, more or less).

Which add-ons will be available? So far, all we know is the developer list: KORG, SonicCharge (of uTonic and Synplant fame), Peff (Kurt Kurasaki), Softube, and Urs Heckmann (u-he). I also saw iZotope in the crowd, but make of that what you will. Props aren’t saying much more than that; other developers may be involved but aren’t yet public.

Will there be an SDK for any developer? I got a clear answer from Ernst on this: yes. Anyone will be able to download the SDK and make add-ons. There are a couple of caveats. First, you have to have an established business entity (in the EU, with a VAT ID / outside Europe, just some legal entity). Second, it’s just not ready yet. What we saw today was a technology preview, but Propellerhead says they’re eager to open this up to other developers; they’re just not quite prepared to handle that process yet. We don’t yet know to what extent the store you see in Reason will be curated or how, and I wonder if free add-ons might get around the need for a publishing business. What I can say is, there won’t be a developer fee.

Will hardware DSP be supported? Not at this time, or evidently in the forseeable future. Ernst emphasized that Propellerhead feels the current multi-core engine is sufficient. So, no Universal Audio add-ons — but remember, if you really want that, you can just ReWire Reason into a host.

Will you be able to make open-source plug-ins? This seems possible, given you can run DSP code. Your code is your own. I didn’t have time to get an official answer on this; I think it’ll be easier to look at once we can see the SDK.

Can you have UI elements? This came up in the press conference. There are some limitations in the “first release,” say Propellerhead. But there was an impressive demo from SonicCharge with a nice, animated visual display for Bitspeak; suffice to say, you won’t directly port VST UI code, but plug-in devs can work with what Propellerhead is giving them. It’s not so much having to deal with having a new plug-in format as having to work with some new UI requirements – and, quite frankly, that’s a potential issue with any plug-in that has any UI at all. On the upside:

Can you use Reason back-panel routing tools and the like? Yes. You can do all the CV routing and automation and other good stuff a conventional Reason device would have.

These are just more Combinator skins, yeah? No. We’re talking low-level DSP – which also means the DSP portion can be ported really fast. Propellerhead said Softube compiled in 15 minutes – for both Mac and Windows. Most of the time you’ll now wind up investing in UI. (That chuckling sound you hear from developers is because this is generally the case with plug-ins.)

But I can do this with existing plug-in formats. Not quite. There are several elements missing. First, Reason will have an integrated store for this stuff, which also means the ability to move between users, computers, and operating systems more seamlessly. Second, existing plug-ins don’t do things like true host-integrated undo. (Ernst gave the ugly example of tweaking a knob in a plug-in, hitting undo, and undoing the last step – inserting the plug-in – making the whole thing disappear.) Third, and perhaps most importantly, you don’t get sandboxing features in any current plug-in format, meaning a misbehaved plug-in can theoretically crash your whole host.

What’s in it for developers? A 70/30 split — developer/Props — just like Apple’s iOS and Mac stores. And it’s free to join the developer program, so there’s nothing to lose but, uh, time.

But this is just proprietary tech. What experience does Propellerhead have with third-party developers? Oh, just these little things called ReWire and (loop format) REX – which, along with Steinberg’s VST really led the way as far as third-party, cross-platform formats. (REX arguably had a lot to do with the rise of looping software.) Each of these have been used in multiple operating systems and hosts, and require dealing with developers. This is much bigger, of course.

How does this help me collaborate? Propellerhead brought this up with a selling point, so I followed up. Basically, the scenario is this: you’re sharing a track with another Reason user. They don’t have the Squidoodlidoo plug-in you purchased. They can use a 30-day demo, and try it for free. (Otherwise, they have to buy the plug-in, too, naturally.) Also, Ernst tells CDM that the store will maintain every back version of every plug-in. So if you need a previous version, you can revert to that on a set. Reason itself can still open, in version 6, files created in version 1.

So, why would I use an existing plug-in format, if this is The Future? Probably because there’s a host you like better than Reason, or you have one of the many plug-ins that won’t yet support this new thing. But you knew that, right? The payoff here is clearly if you like working in Reason and want more flexibility.

Why a new format? Actually, I’ll editorialize on this one. The kind of integration with Reason here just wouldn’t work with any plug-in format – we’re talking routing control voltage in and out via the back of the rack, integrated automation, and a UI that seamlessly blends with Reason. It’s not a question of formats; you have to write a plug-in for Reason or none of that is possible. As for why existing plug-in formats don’t do some of the things Reason’s tech here does, that’s easy. No one has actually proposed a plug-in format that does that, a handful of vendors control existing formats in wide commercial use (Apple, Steinberg, Avid), and efforts to build a new standard haven’t gotten traction. So, in the meantime, if you want these ideas in practice, you have to build them in your own software, which is what Reason has done. If you want these ideas elsewhere, let’s see it.

Got more questions? I’ll append answers here if I can find them. Expect more once we hear more on what’s actually available to add onto your rack (for users) and once we’re closer to having stuff ready for a wider audience of developers (for you coders). No images or video yet – I know we still owe you a look at the new iOS app – but that’ll get posted when ready.

More details, and ugly speculation about whether or not I was wearing pants, in the live event coverage:
http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/03/propellerhead-announces-mobile-app-figure-live-announcement-coverage/

Apple yesterday described their iPad as “this magical pane of glass that can become anything you want it to be.” So – how about making mobile devices into what you want it to be?

With the help of author Peter Brinkmann and publisher O’Reilly, we’d like to give you a taste of Peter’s new book, Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS. Imagining that a lot of you are especially curious about iOS, we’ll include the chapter on how to get started with development. It really gives you a sense of how easy this can be; the challenge is, as it should be, coming up with musical ideas. And Apple did say that they thought that technology was at its best when it was “invisible,” not when it was “inaudible.” So let’s make it make some noise.

(Android developers, libpd actually got its start on Android and runs quite well even on very primitive Android handsets, so consider this a sample; the full book – and the libpd site – include loads of examples on the Android side, too. In fact, because libpd works basically identically on the two platforms, it’s a great choice for making cross-platform development easier.)

In this excerpt, Peter covers:

• How to set up your development environment
• Starting a project with Xcode, and including Pd
• How to make a Pd patch run in your app
• Making the Pd patch and your UI connect with each other (here, from the app’s UI to Pd; the book covers both directions)

In fact, in just a few pages, you’ll have a working guitar tuner for iOS. Have a look:

Read it on CDM’s Scribd page:

Making Musical Apps (Excerpt: How to Build a Music App for iOS)

Direct PDF download link, hosted by CDM (please don’t link to this file directly):
Making Musical Apps (Excerpt) [PDF]

I’ve read an advance copy of the whole book, and my review is simple: if you’re curious about this stuff, get this book. Peter’s style is friendly and precise; no technical detail is left out, and yet those details aren’t overwhelming. The book can be accessible to those new to development, which is essential for a title that’s likely to be read by people who are used to Pd, but dipping their toes into Java and Objective-C for the first time in order to get their patches running on a device.

Ready for the full book?

Get a printed copy on Amazon:

Or read the Kindle edition:

For multi-platform epub, mobi, and PDF formats, head straight to the O’Reilly page:
Making Musical Apps [shop.oreilly.com]

http://libpd.cc/read-the-book/

If you’re a Mac user, we’ve got some cheap and free tools for you. And if you’re a Max patcher, you may be surprised with how they were built: they were all exported from Max 6.

This week, we welcome a guest writer developer Dan Nigrin. Amidst some new controversy about Apple and app distribution, here Dan looks at how Apple’s marketplace can indeed be useful to developers using Max 6, the popular graphical patching tool. (Incidentally, the libpd library could work for App Store apps, too, and for mobile on iOS and Android, along with various other tools, so developers now have lots of options for getting their ideas out there.) -PK

CDM has covered the Mac App Store and its impact (or not) on music software quite extensively in the past – see Apple’s App Store May Not Work for Audio Devs; Developers Respond, October 2010, and Six Reasons the Mac App Store Means Little for Music Creation – At Least For Now, January 2011.

But I think a new development may start to change things, at least a little bit. Cycling ‘74’s newly-released Max 6 now makes it possible for standalone apps created with it to be released on the Mac App Store. Previous versions of Max caused some standalone preference files to be written to a Preferences folder on the Mac; believe it or not, this violated an Apple Mac Store rule (an app can only write to very specific locations, not including the Preferences folder – go figure). To Cycling’s credit, they changed the preferences file location starting in Max 6, and so that obstacle has now been removed from getting Max apps in the Store.

I first asked the question about getting Max-built apps in the Mac App Store around the time Apple originally announced it in 2010 – see a thread in the Cycling ’74 forums. Soon after, Oli Larkin tested the waters, and he was the first to discover the above problem with the preference files. After Cycling addressed that, James Howard Young then tackled more minutia required to pass all the approval and validation steps Apple requires, and was the first to successfully get his app live on the store, followed soon after by Oli’s and then my two. We all shared our experience on the above thread, and with each other in private emails.

The apps have done quite well (Audio Plugin Player, below, made it up to #7 on Top Paid Apps in the Music category of the App Store within 48 hours of release), though we are all still experimenting with different price points, support models, etc. — usual App Store growing pains, I would imagine. Here are the apps currently available – note that there may be more, these are just the ones I know about:

Four Apps, Available Now

Defective Records Software (Dan Nigrin)
Audio Plugin Player
Get it on CDM Apps

A lightweight VST and AU instrument plugin host, that allows you to play these instruments using either your mouse, computer keyboard (including support for non-US keyboards), or MIDI device (both hardware and software MIDI devices supported). It has a simple, one-screen interface, without any of the complexity that a DAW takes for a newcomer to get up and running.

Defective Records Software (Dan Nigrin)
General MIDI Player
Get it on CDM Apps

An easy way to turn your Mac into an instrument, using its built-in General MIDI support. You can play these instruments using either your mouse, computer keyboard (including support for non-US keyboards), or MIDI device (both hardware and software MIDI devices supported). It has a simple, one-screen interface.

James Howard Young
TapNTempo
Get it on CDM Apps

A fully featured metronome that offers customizable sounds, real-time tempo tapping, and beat and division capabilities. TapNTempo’s easy-to-use interface includes the best of the traditional metronome, but feature bloating is avoided in favor of simplicity.

Oli Larkin
pMix
Get it on CDM Apps

pMix is a sound design, composition and performance tool that allows you to morph between VST plugin presets using an intuitive graphical interface. 

Presets are represented by coloured balls that are positioned on a 2D plane. The size of each ball and its proximity to the cursor affects the weight of the associated preset in the interpolation.

Morphing between presets often results in the discovery of interesting hybrid sounds. By constraining sound manipulations within a predesigned “interpolation space” complex transitions can be achieved that would otherwise be hard to manage.

pMix can load four VST2 audio plugins. It comes with a suite of specially designed plugins which cover a range of experimental DSP techniques (noise generators, FM synthesis, formant filtering, frequency shifting etc). These plugins can also be used in other VST host applications.

Conclusions, Looking Forward

I made a decision to “start simple” with my App Store apps, compared to for example my Klee or Cyclic. But as you can see, you’re not limited to just simple apps – Oli’s, for instance, is obviously quite complex. So I think that this is just the beginning of what I expect will be many Max apps on the App Store – it makes it possible for the many, many interesting projects developed in Max to reach a much bigger audience that possible before. Just taking a look at the Projects page on the Cycling web site gives a sample of what soon might find its way there.

Perhaps even more exciting is news from Damon Holzborn and Brad Garton of Columbia University, that they are working on a path from Max to iOS apps, and in a way that makes them totally compliant with the iTunes App Store. Really looking forward to this!

We’re looking forward to this, too, so we’ve assembled a special section that shows apps built with Max available on the Mac App Store. We may soon follow this with other tools (Pd, Csound, etc.) if there’s demand. But here are those Max options:

Made with Max, Featured on CDM Apps

Can You Play in the Sandbox?

Ed.: One issue to watch as Apple’s brave, new App Store moves forward is sandboxing requirements. For these Max apps, it shouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but before it appears that we’re endorsing the App Store for all music apps, regardless of purpose, we’re not. A number of Apple developers have raised some concerns about sandboxing and how it’s implemented. They’re worth reading if you’re a developer – and may, in turn, inspire some tweaks from Apple in terms of how this is done. All via Daring Fireball:

Sandboxing and xScope 3.0 [furbo.org]
Fix The Sandbox [Red Sweater]
Sandboxing and Clipstart [Manton Reece]

Here are Dan’s own thoughts on the subject:

No, I’m not concerned about plugin hosting with respect to sandboxing; the sandboxing rules stipulate that you’re allowed to access files on the host system if the user specifies the file in which they are interested via a file dialog. So, in my Audio Plugin Player app, for example, that’s what I do – the user is prompted to pick the plugin they want to use via file dialog (or they can drag and drop it onto the app). That way, I am not breaking any sandbox rules.

Also, one can request additional “entitlements” for one’s application, which allow it to access locations that are not currently “approved” areas within the file system for the app to access. I’d be surprised if requesting an entitlement to access the Plug-Ins folder was not allowed… Ed. That would be, of course, relevant to Apple’s own Logic Pro as a host; despite predictions to the contrary, it appears third party developers should – theoretically – have access to the same entitlements as Apple’s own apps. And if that’s not enough, you can still distribute via other means, including in Mountain Lion, and in contrast to the App Store-only iOS model. -PK

It makes sense that the App Store, with its specific sales model and technical requirements, will suit some applications well and not others. Because you can choose to install apps from other sources, that leaves both users and developer free to choose based on their needs.

I’m not sure how everyone who owns an iPad uses it for music, but I find myself strangely drawn, more than anything else, to analog step sequencers. With MIDI connections – via a special interface or a standard USB MIDI interface connected via adapter to the tablet – you can even drive hardware. For me, the app of choice has been Little MIDI Machine. Developer Chris Randall has a new application in the analog-style sequencing category, though, called Phaedra.

If you haven’t grabbed it already, you have until the New Year to get it for US$4.99 before the price jumps to ten bucks. And you get an impressive array of features:

• Multiple buses, with 32 steps max each
• Programmable note, velocity, gate time, and two MIDI CC outs for each step
• Send or receive MIDI Clock for sync
• Use MIDI hardware (via Core MIDI), other apps (using “background MIDI” or OMAC), or your computer (networking via a MIDI Network Session

Phaedra for iPad [iTunes Store Link; you'll need iOS 5.0]

I wanted to know more about the creation of Phaedra. Developer and musician Chris Randall, known for his work with boutique plug-in maker Audio Damage, released this under a new moniker, Naughty Panther, which does iOS and MIDI development. Chris has been known to mix old and new, as with his musical use of the Apple II. Here, he gives us some insight into how he went through the design process on this new tool.

CDM: How do you sketch out the UI on a project like this? Paper and pencil?

Chris: Normally I just make notes in a little Field Notes notebook as I think about them — I carry one everywhere — then once I have a clear mental image of what I want to make, I just bust it straight out in Photoshop (or, for skeuomorphic interfaces like this one, a combination of Photoshop for the panel and 3D Studio Max for the knobs and buttons).

What inspiration did you consider as far as hardware?

Adam sent me the page for the Moon Modular 568 “Sequential Trigger Source” and quipped that it would make a fun iPad app, and I kind of ran with it. (Their site is a frame-a-thon, but ’tis here: http://www.lunar-experience.com/home.html) As you can see, the UI for Phaedra closely follows the Moon Modular design. The functionality diverges quite a bit, though. Once I had the initial look, I just started adding features I personally thought would be nice in a step sequencer. Then the beta testers had some more input. And now that it is out, I’m getting a ton of great feature requests from the users. The next update will have some cool tricks in it, provided I can figure out how to code them.

What hardware would you recommend for connecting MIDI?

The best MIDI I/O situation for Phaedra is an Alesis iO Dock. Hands down. I have tested it with a half dozen MIDI interfaces via the [Apple] Camera Connection Kit [for connecting driverless USB MIDI interfaces], and they all work fine except that $5 cheap one that people buy from Amazon, which unsurprisingly, has problems. Phaedra also automatically creates a virtual port and connects to all virtual endpoints running on the iPad, so it can drive NLog Pro, Animoog, whatever. And it also is [Apple MIDI] Network Session aware, so it can just work over wi-fi.

I’m going to add OSC output as an option in the next update, I think. I’m still thinking about how to implement that, but it seems like it would be handy, and then Phaedra’s abilities would be greatly increased.

I’m also adding trigger outputs via the audio ports, so you can use Phaedra to clock an external modular sequencer like Makenoise René, or a pre-MIDI drum machine. I’m giving it 48-ppq clock for Korg drum machines, 24-ppq clock for most every other drum machine, and arbitrary rates from 16-ppq on up to 1-ppq for driving modular sequencers and your Monotribe. This should be handy, and will be sample-accurate in line with the MIDI clock output.

See also Chris’ blog entry on the app at Analog Industries:
Some Cool Shit

Music lovers are hacking Apple’s Siri voice recognition technology. By connecting to some of the “intelligence” of the cloud, these tools can make your phone rap or send music files to a player piano for instant musical playback.

First up: Yamaha’s piano taking requests, thanks to music grabbed online. A Yamaha rep explains:

Yamaha consultant Craig Knudsen demonstrates a unique implementation of Apple’s incredible Airplay technology in an exciting new way.
Here’s how it works:
Take a standard MIDI songfile and convert it to an audio file (while maintaining the MIDI data). The songfile is then sent wirelessly via WiFi to an Apple Airport Express (which is mounted underneath a Yamaha Disklavier reproducing piano. The audio output of the Airport Express is then connected to the analog MIDI inputs of the Disklavier, using a standard audio cable.
Then, you simply ask Siri to play your favorite song from your iTunes library, and Siri responds immediately, by making the Disklavier’s keys and pedal move up and down, recreating the performance, including full orchestration.
The result is nothing short of magical.

Of course, the actual “playing” is thanks to the capabilities of the Yamaha Disklavier. I’m actually a bit puzzled as to how the online conversion works, exactly, and I was curious for any Disklavier-owning CDM readers whether this is something publicly available. I’m waiting to hear back from Yamaha.

And now, for something completely different: Siri rapping. (Somewhat … erm … badly, if amusingly. It is a hack.)

My friend Robert “Robb” Böhnke had a lot of fun combining Siri’s voice synthesis and the lyrics of Notorious B.I.G.

My hack for the Music Hack Day 2011 in London, a 24h Hackathon for all things music.

SiriProxy is used to intercept the communication with Apple’s servers. Notorious Siri then sends Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypnotize to the device.

Siri’s speech synthesis is synced to the beat using the timestamps obtained from the Echonest API which were then manually tweaked, to smooth out delays in the text-to-speech engine.

Thanks to Universal Music for awarding me a nice pair of Dr. Dre headphones

The Echonest API, by the way, is an amazing do-everything “API for music,” one that analyzes musical files and connects to a vast storehouse of musical intelligence.

Warning: this video is most definitely Not Safe For Work. (Heck, even the thumbnail isn’t, exactly.) If that concerns you, just go listen to the Yamaha video again, okay?

Siri FAQ [Apple.com]

Previously: Google Translate Beatboxing

…and, of course, that means: Android, your move.

Truly generative musical scores in games have been few and far between, and “music games” has traditionally meant arcade-style rhythm games in which you repeat phrases or whole songs as accurately as possible. Pugs Luv Beats breaks those molds. Part of a vanguard of new gaming creations that generate dynamic music on the fly, it marries grid-based sequencing and resource-gathering gaming, as music making and gameplay blur together. The interactively-produced music could itself become a new way of delivering a musical signature with sound packs.

And beneath it all lurks a free and open source library, libpd – the embeddable version of tried-and-true free graphical music environment Pure Data. (That library is now on GitHub, and vastly updated, by the way, and we’re expecting a book soon from the library’s principle author Peter Brinkmann.)

Oh, yeah, and don’t forget about some seriously addictive gameplay and adorable pugs. I’m suddenly not concerned about the 15 hours Europe-to-North-America travel I’m doing tomorrow.

Here’s what the gameplay looks like, since it’s much easier to see:

Pugs Luv Beats was just approved on the iTunes App Store for iPhone and iPad.

Co-creator Yann Seznec (The Amazing Rolo) is a terrific musician; I just caught up with him in Edinburgh and Berlin and watched him play a homebrewed pig gut instrument with Matthew Herbert for the performance piece “One Pig,” on tour at Berghain. Working with Pd allowed Yann to focus on those musical impulses and not just engineering, and to let him try things he otherwise would never have imagined on a mobile title. So I asked Yann to walk us through how the project was built. He responded with an exhaustively-detailed examination of the evolution of this title, right down to the Pd patches. (Click through for high-res versions.) If your New Year’s Resolution is doing something with patching, you might want to hang onto these answers. Here’s Yann:

The origins of Pugs Luv Beats date back about two years. After making [musical iPhone game] Mujik, Jon (Jonathan Brodsky, aka jonbro) and I were trying to think of other approaches to music mobile app design, and we started thinking more and more about games. Music games, as a whole, are an oddly passive and traditionalist experience – you play along with a premade track, and you are judged on your accuracy and flair (which is strangely reminiscent of music conservatory mindset…). Obviously there are exceptions (RjDj’s Dimensions, Elektroplankton, etc.), but there you go.

Particularly interesting to me was the idea that game mechanics are often very similar to compositional techniques. So for example, when Sonic runs at a normal speed he collects rings at one rate. However when he powers up and goes super fast, he collects rings at a much higher rate. This could be compared to introducing a melody and then speeding it up – and when there are two players, doing this with two melodies. Instant fugue!

We started looking at how we could make a music game where the music and the game elements were fully intertwined and augmented by each other. So Jon prototyped a space shooter drum machine. It was awesome.

To make a (very very very long and boring) story short, our idea and prototype landed us some funding from Channel 4 and Creative Scotland to work on games that focus on musical creativity and composition.

For various reasons, we decided to put aside the space shooter drum machine for a while, and start from scratch. After going through several full prototyping iterations we eventually settled on a core game mechanic that turned out to be in many ways similar to a Tenori-on [Yamaha grid instrument]/Boiingg-style [monome hardware patch] music generation system – in our final prototype, you controlled a series of little dots that moved around the screen, creating loops. This is super fun from a musical perspective because it’s easy and rewarding within a few seconds, and when you have several loops going it can gain some pretty serious rhythmic and melodic depth.

The key from there for us was turning this into a game. We had been using free Internet graphics packs up until then (we hadn’t hired our artist Sean yet) which featured a ladybug, so we had been referring to the main characters as ‘bugs’. During some discussion one of us accidentally said ‘pugs’, and the game idea was born. We constructed a story about pugs and their love for beets (like the vegetables) which create beats (ha!), and how their love turned into greed and got out of control, destroying their world. The game, therefore, is about helping the pugs rebuild their lost civilization by guiding them to create beats. You grow your galaxy by collecting beats, which you do most efficiently when you dress your pugs up in costumes. What’s not to like?

To get to the part that I imagine CDM readers are most interested in, the app development was done by Jon using openFrameworks, [lightweight language] Lua, our own game engine called Blud, and the audio is all done in Pure Data using libpd (through ofxPd). In hindsight we started using libpd really late in the game, just at the very end of the prototyping stage, which was rather silly. Our adoption of libpd basically made our dev cycle about a million times more efficient. My background is as a musician and sound designer, and I have very little coding knowledge. I do, however, have lots of knowledge of Max/MSP, so picking up Pure Data was pretty easy. This allowed Jon to completely pass off all the audio processing (not to mention aesthetic sound design choices) to me, saving him loads of time, giving me direct control over the sound, and letting me test and prototype different approaches to audio within an environment that I knew would be recreated in the game. Also, as Jon mentioned to me recently, by using PD we are able to take advantage of 20 years of audio DSP research and development. Pretty amazing.

How it all works:

The entire audio engine is contained within this patch. Pardon the messiness.

The simplest part of the patch is the “sounds” section, which is used to playback simple sound effects, for the most part linked with interface actions in the game. I did this by creating a very simple patch which plays a sound when it receives a bang. Which sound it plays is dictated by the argument (in this case, the sound of discovering a new capsule). The process for adding a new sound, then, is as simple as adding the sound file to the /assets/sounds/ folder, and making a new instance of “sounds.pd” and naming it the same as the new sound. Jon, in the project code, created a list called “sounds” which is sent into Pure Data. When that list contains “capsule”, a bang is sent into that subpatch, and the sound is played.

A more complex version of what could be done with this type of data is seen in the voice of Mr Puggles, who helps you learn how to play the game. Mr Puggles pops on and off the screen to guide you through the first few worlds, and when he does he send Pure Data a “puggleShow” and “puggleHide” signal. I wanted to give Puggles a funny synthesizer voice that was different every time – dead simple in PD. To do that, I take the puggleShow bang and use it to trigger five more bangs, spaced out over a second. Each of these bangs triggers a random number which is translated into a MIDI note. This note controls the pitch of two oscillators (a sine and a sawtooth), one of which is slightly modified to make them slightly different pitches. These are played through a short volume envelope and a filter which is also controlled by a random number generator. Result? Hilarious beeping boopy Mr Puggles voice, all coming from one bang.

Every time a player buys or selects a planet, a short list is sent to Pure Data comprised of the planet BPM and a random number seed. The BPM is used to calculate delay times and such, and the random number seed is used to create a sort of musical identity for the planet. This is done by choosing a “beat library” and a musical mode.

The mode is created by building a lookup table that chooses the notes from a chromatic scale that would be used in a particular mode. For example, a major scale (ionian mode) uses notes 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12. Each melodic sound library I used is comprised of a full chromatic octave, and the notes that are played on any given planet are controlled by this table. This ensures not only that all of the different sound libraries being played on a planet will be in the same key, but also that a planet will have a strong melodic identity.

The sound libraries in the game are all controlled by the pugs on the planets. As they run around, each time they land they will trigger a sound. The type of sound is dependent on what terrain they are on – thus, if they run through the snow they play a toy piano, if they run through lava a distorted guitar, etc. There are two states of playing the sound, one if the player deliberately tells the pug to go to that tile, and the second if the pug is traveling over that tile to get somewhere else. It’s super easy to do that kind of thing in Pd; just set up two different ‘play sound’ envelopes, maybe a little extra delay or reverb, and you’re done!

The final piece of the puzzle for making the pugs running around into music is to make each tile be a different note. The terrain of each planet is created by making a sort of height map, where different heights correspond with different terrain types (grass, water, snow, etc). This also means that each tile has a unique number between 0 and 1. When the player buys or selects a planet, a giant random number table is generated in Pure Data which creates a number between 1 and 13 for each possible value between 0 and 1. That value is what is used to pick the note of the mode. This somewhat convoluted approach again lets us make sure that each planet will have a unique, but fully reproducible, musical character.

The actual playing of the sounds is probably the messiest part of the patch structure. Purists look away now.

I wanted to make sure this part of the patch was as flexible as possible, so I ended up using the soundfiler and tabread~ objects, rather than tabplay~, which is great in practice though does look rather uncouth. Additionally, I had some limitations imposed upon the structure of the patch – namely, I had to keep the number of tables down as much as possible, to save on memory. So each sound bank has two voice polyphony – there are many sound banks, and the beats and sound effects aren’t counted in this, so that limitation is not really heard in the final product at all. It did mean I had to work out a decent voice allocation system though!

I think my memory issues were probably my only problem with using PD in this project – though only indirectly. As I mentioned, they were hardly a problem artistically, however it took me a while to get used to the idea that not everything I patched on a computer would work on an iPhone. Similarly, I had to be very careful about things like relative volumes. In a generative music game like Pugs Luv Beats, the player could quite easily send 15 pugs running around making sound, which mounts up pretty quickly. It means that all of the patches and sound need to be designed to withstand lots of triggering without distorting. None of these things are problems, really, all they require is regular testing on devices and simulators – something that every mobile developer is already used to.

That’s the Pure Data audio engine in a nutshell. The end result is a flexible and powerful audio engine that sounds really great and is fully integrated into Pugs Luv Beats. The game is a great combination of music, silliness, and strategy – there’s a bit of something in there for everyone. You can definitely just play with the game to make beats, or you can try and collect all of the costumes, or you can try and make the most efficient planet ever. You can also explore the galaxies being made by your Game Center friends, to hear what they’re up to.

The background story:

And, just for fun, a silly promo featuring real pugs. Anyone traumatized by the sight of Pd patches, these should relax you.

More information at the developer site:
http://luckyframe.co.uk/pugsluvbeats/game.html

Graphics are good. Graphics are shiny. But when it comes to reality-bending, emotionally-immersive, perception-shifting power, look to sound and music.

At least that’s the feeling you could get after playing Dimensions. Following their reactive music tools and Inception dream states for iOS, RjDj have turned their mind-altering sonics to gameplay. As with previous releases, these tools are powered by the open source visual development environment Pure Data. Pd engineering wizardry here meetings the compositional and sound design prowess of Hans Zimmer.

You can see a bit of how the musical world works in the teaser video above, and the music sound design video below.

But we wanted quite a lot more information. So, CDM got RjDJ’s Rob, Joe, and Martin to share some detailed thoughts on how the game experience is put together and how it works.

The App

RjDj Team: Most games require your full attention when you play them. You either live your life or play the game. Dimensions is different. It’s designed to be played in parallel with your normal life.

Gameplay is intertwined deeply into your daily life. Some dimensions unlock if you are physically active and others unlock if you are quiet. The app automatically detects what you are doing and syncs the game to it making use of every possible sensor on the iPhone.

You stay immersed in the game by listening to augmented sound and the voice of Emily from Mission Control. She guides you through many exciting challenges like collecting Artifacts and avoiding the dreaded Nephilim.

With Dimensions we are very interested in creating a gameplay experience which is between the device based focus of a casual game and the passive use of listening to music. Its a game which you play by listening – a game that place in parallel to your everyday life.

The Tech: Reading Files

We built our own version of readsf, rj_readsf, in order to be able to read compressed audio and make the samples available for processing in Pd. One advantage of readsf is that possibly lengthy audio assets do not need to be loaded into memory. If memory is limited, especially when Pd may be running in the background, limiting exposure to system memory warnings helps keep the app running and the music playing. Given that compressed audio is roughly ten times smaller in size than uncompressed audio, and that audio assets make up the majority of the size of the entire app, it is a huge benefit to be able to deliver and read compressed audio assets directly, without the need to decompress in memory or onto disk. Dimensions requires that several dozen such players be open and viable at any time, and special consideration was given to concurrent behaviour. rj_readsf can loop a file when it gets to the end, and it indicates with a bang when a file has been loaded (an asynchronous operation) or the end as been reached (in the non-looping case). rj_readsf is built on iOS standard APIs and can read any file format that iOS can.

Ed.: I’m waiting to hear if rj_readsf will be open-sourced. The issue of reading files is one we’ve had around libpd recently. While their rj_readsf sounds great, my sense is the best long-term solution will be a similar object that is independent of the APIs of any one OS, so this same set of problems may need a different solution for the open source community more generally. (Building such a tool is absolutely possible, though it might require more effort.)

The Music, and How the Music Plays with You

The music of Dimensions uses various different techniques from straight sample playback to audio analysis and synthesis:

Realtime manipulation of audio input from the mic:

This is perhaps the most recognisable technique we use. We process audio from the iPhone microphone live in many different ways. It’s kinda like a feeling of being inside the music.

The key thing we do with effects is attempting to analyse the environment of the player / listener and then making appropriate things happen within the effect. For instance, the Flux Dimension features a filterbank on the mic input. We analyse the incoming audio from the players environment and make the filter frequencies change as events occur ( either due to pitch changes or onsets ) this gives the impression that objects and activity around the player is somehow “playing” the music.

In the Ghost Dimension there is an effect which records audio whenever it detects an event, then scrubs repeatedly forwards and backwards through the sample using granular techniques stretching it out in time. This manipulation accentuates the textural and pitch based qualities of the sample as it repeats and works well with the atmospheric music Hans Zimmer composed.

Dynamically-controlled stems:

All the Dimensions use stems and hits from a conventional sequencer in some way, re-arranged live on the device relative to how the player is interacting. These stems were mainly composed in Cubase and Logic.

For example, in the Kinetic Dimension we feed accelerometer data from the device into Pd and drive the music from that. The player hears more energetic beats when they go for a run, but if they stop at the lights to cross the road, the drums immediately drop away. This was achieved with a large number of hits with all the rhythmic sequencing happening in a hybrid reactive / generative way live on the device.

In the Tranquil Dimension, the music introduces more stems the longer the player is quiet. If they make too much noise the music “shrinks away” from them and becomes quieter. If they stay in a Zen like peaceful state, the music grows into a kind of crescendo of serenity.

Reactive synthesis:

We often control parts of the music by doing a frequency analysis of incoming microphone audio from the device and then using those frequencies to determine the notes synths will play within the music. The Travelling Dream in Inception the App uses this extensively. Tranquil Dimension in Dimensions also uses onset and frequency changes to trigger synth melodies in the music.

The synths we use range in complexity from very simple additive synthesis to some great synth patches from the rjlib by Frank Barknecht and Andy Farnell.

Generative approaches:

There are some sections within Dimensions which are generative. These play back prepared samples as well as triggering onboard synthesis. They also feed the results of this through various live sampling and glitching patches. They are governed by various sets of rules which have various long term parameters, like adjusting to the intensity of the audio environment of the listener, or how dense areas of music have been around the present time.

Sample triggering:

Ghost Dimension uses a simple but effective technique of triggering samples from the music on onsets in the environment. This can cause some real jump out of your skin moments. We combined this section with a randomised very short delay on the mic which acts almost like a resonator, turning the mic sounds into creepy atonal pitched noises.

Sound Design

The main hub section in Dimensions, called the Launch screen, acts as a entry point to your augmented adventures. It also displays all available Dimensions via the floating tile icons.

Visually, these represent a snapshot of your previous experience using your location at that time. Sonically we wanted them to have an aura or energy from the Dimensions themselves.

SoundCloud examples:
Dimensions Sound Design Example by rjdjme

Example of using mixture of synthesis and samples to create user feedback when interacting with Dimension icons in the game.

Map Tile Down: several recordings of a synth in Pure Data that is played when the tiles are touched. Each one is slightly different due using two detuned oscillators.

Map Tile Open Only: a sample from Logic Pro for the woosh sound when showing the information view.

Map Tile Click: a sample from Logic Pro for touch events.

Map Tile Open: recording of how it sounds when put together.

Sound is a mixture of samples and real-time synthesis. The energy sound is made using two oscillators (one detuned) to create some modulation for a glowing effect. Added to some harmonics to make it more of a beam sound and some chorus and reverb. The open tile is made in logic, when closed it’s the same sound but reversed and pitched down in Pd.

We wanted the tiles you tap on to feel like each Dimension has some sort of energy radiating out.

Here’s a sense of how the sound design works in the game:

It’s an ambitious app, and the whole cost is US$2.99. I guarantee it’ll change your world more than a latte. (Well … unless we’re talking a really crazy latte. And that might not be legal.) As sometimes-CDM contributor Jaymis Loveday notes, there are terrific choices in coloring Google Maps, and how modes change based on ambient sound and motion.

Requires an iPhone 3GS or better, or third-generation iPod Touch or better, or an iPad.

Dimensions @ iTunes Store

More reading:
Dimensions Augments Reality Purely Through Sound [Leigh Alexander, one of my favorite game writers, for Gamasutra
The Roundabout Tapes – RjDj now plans to game reality with sound [TCTV] [Techcrunch EU]

First revealed last month, PreenFM is an open source hardware synth. As the name implies, it’s an FM synth, with some very serious specs: up to six-operator FM synthesis with some nine algorithms, up to 4-voice polyphony (depending on algorithm), glide, selectable LFOs, modulation matrix, and preset banks with SysEx support. It’s all usable via a display and MIDI support.

It’s also fully open source hardware; whereas early efforts often had commercial restrictions attached, PreenFM is free for use under the GPLv3 and Creative Commons. And it’s got a unique platform under the hood: the open source LeafLabs 32-bit development platform gives this some serious horsepower. It’s very much in contrast to the ultra-inexpensive 8-bit brain of our own MeeBlip synth; think of the MeeBlip as an exercise in what you can do with a little two-stroke engine versus the V8 muscle in this. (The creator says the MeeBlip helped inspire his creation – yes, synths are multiplying!)

You may have glimpsed the PreenFM making the rounds online, but I got creator Xavier Hosxe to tell us more of the gory details and share some sounds.

CDM: So this is all based on the Leaf platform?

Xavier: Yes it’s built around a LeafLab board.
I coded a first version on the Maple [development board]; then when they announced their “Maple Mini,” I realized it was going to be very easy to plug it into a PCB.
I’m not directly connected to [LeafLabs]; I participated in the forum and learnt many things from the team.

They are very friendly and helpful.

What was it like working with the Leaf?

The LeafLabs boards uses an ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller.

It’s a 32-bit chip runing at 72Mhz that can do 32-bit multiplication in 1 clock cycle, has 128Kb of flash [memory] and 20Kb of RAM. That seems very few but it’s not, PreenFM software uses 92Kb for the moment.

LeafLabs provide a Linux/gcc toolchain that allows to develop in your IDE of choice… Eclipse in my case, which is very confortable.

They also provide a strong bootloader and some libraries that worked perferfeclty for my needs : Usart (Midi), I2C (EEPROM), LiquidCrystal (LCD).

What will you get in the PreenFM kit?

All you need to build yourself a complete synth: PCB, screws, resistors, ICs, audio/midi jack, box, 20×4 LCD, encoders, knobs, buttons… even an USB cable [for power].

You’ll also get a Maple Mini board with PreenFM soft preloaded. The Maple Mini is easily updatable, and you can experiment lots of different things with it.

PreenFM C++ source code is available on GitHub. It’s easy to read and modifiable. If you want to see your name to welcome you on the boot screen, go ahead

To build the kit, you only need a soldering iron and some solder.

There will be 2 differences with the photos you can see on the site: the final PCB will be blue (I should receive them next week). [Ed.: See the photo in blue at top; the orange one is included here for variety! -PK]

Xavier also sends along some welcome news:

Here is a sound I can get with my soon-to-be-released StepSequencer feature in PreenFM.

This is a single voice of a simple 3-oscillator voice. 1 very slow LFO + 2 * step sequencer routed to the modulation indices.

PreenFMStepSeq by cdm

Here’s a sound sample:
PreenFM 1 by cdm

http://www.preenfm.net