Here’s a software release I don’t think most observers saw coming: Roland has new software for computers and iPads that lets you edit visually. The underlying VariPhrase technology is familiar from other Roland products, though combined here with something Roland calls V-Remastering.

The upshot is this: you begin with a heat map-like visual of a sound’s spectrum, then pull on components of a mix, isolating the volume levels of different parts of a track. Think visual mash-ups and karaoke tracks, as well as clean-up.

What can you do once you have those components? Isolate components, adjust their mix, and add effects and noise cancel.

Once isolated, you can also change pitch, time, and formant independently. You don’t get note-by-note control in the same way that you do with Celemony’s Melodyne product, but you do get independent pitch and time. (I’m not yet clear on whether that’s also in the iPad version.)

There’s also a simplified iPad version called R-MIX Tab, a new move for Roland’s software lineup. As you can see in the screenshots, you can’t do as much with the iPad edition, but it still looks relatively capable. Oh, and that “Tab” name implies that maybe Roland is at least considering tablet tech running Android and Windows 8.

Pricing and availability information were not yet available; TBD. I’ll be interested to see how this works, and how people use it. Roland has a slew of announcements; more on the others by tomorrow.

http://www.rolandconnect.com/product.php?p=r-mix

Developer Alex Zolotov has been producing fascinating experiments for the iPhone. Today, we’re covering updates to Alex’s SunVox production tool, on iOS and desktop alike, but this pair of iOS tools deserves its own post. I could try to describe them, but there’s little to say that can’t be clearly seen in the video: you draw sounds, in spectral form (bottom) and waveform view (top), in order to produce synths graphically. The idea isn’t new, of course, but it’s beautifully implemented here in a way that’s immediate and sonically rich.

Below, one other recent iOS creation, SoundFields, which also takes on fascinating graphical approaches to sound.

The apps:
SoundFields [warmplace.ru]
SpectrumGen [iTunes App Store]
PixelWave [iTunes App Store]

Off topic, but a terrific way to waste time not making music from Alex – and a great audiovisual experience, to boot. (Call it “homework” researching sound and image or something.) Pixel Cave [Windows, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile, iOS - that link also links to another interesting tracker]

Nerds: It’s an OSC sequencer. It’s JavaScript-programmable for making your own generative music. It works with hardware and other software. You can use it in real-time.

Everyone: it makes spectacularly strange sounds out of spectacularly beautiful flows of geometries through space.

IanniX, the latest-generation descendant of work done by pioneering experimental composer Iannis Xenakis, has been evolving at rapid pace into what may be the most sophisticated graphical sequencer ever. Xenakis originally had to content himself to drawing elaborate, architectural graphics on paper, then later being one of the first to use a graphical tablet for interactive scores. IanniX, backed by the French Ministry of Culture, is now barely recognizable even from more primitive versions that carried the same name. But the idea is the same: graphical geometries represent events in pitch and time, now sequencing other software (any software that can handle OSC or MIDI) to produce sound.

Free on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and now with growing documentation, IanniX can be seen producing the kinds of warped sounds Xenakis made in his music. But it is one of the first steps toward a graphical sequencer that could be used in all kinds of cases. And it’s free and open source under the GPL v3.

I’ve included some of the recent videos that show off what it can do. I especially like the recursive demo. But since it runs on your OS — well, unless you’re sticking to your beloved Atari ST or BeBox — you can just go grab it yourself.

http://iannix.org/en/index.php

My sense is that IanniX could have implications even beyond this software. Imagine a greater variety of music software that begins to work in spatial and graphical interfaces, not just the traditional piano rolls and linear tape-style arrangement views. And imagine that such tools, using protocols like OSC and MIDI, begin to establish common means of communicating with one another over a network. (OSC and, in particular, MIDI, are in need of some evolution to fully satisfy that. But these kinds of tools might be an ideal way to prod that very evolution.)

Speaking of prodding, thanks to Mark Birchall on Twitter for reminding me to write this up.

Now, if I can just find some hyperspace portal to additional space and time to play with this properly… there must be a productivity jump gate around here somewhere.

“din is noise” is a newly-updated “tone board,” making the rectangular plane of its screen into a field of sound you can transform. The video above just begins to show some of what it can do. Pixels can be tones, transformed onscreen. A resonator editor uses Bezier curves to edit sounds across octaves. Each resonator, in turn, can be edited with yet more Bezier curves. Put them together into the drone editor (the bit you see in the video), and you can create vast, sculpted soundscapes from series of rectangles dragged around between octaves.

It’s all free, and it’s all doable for your mouse – a Linux exclusive that might convince you to dual boot, or take a second look at that netbook.

The results here tend toward the ambient, but if you’d like to tap your toe a bit to what you make, there’s already a stereo gate effect, so knock yourself out. And timbrally, you can use any waveform.

This isn’t just a sound toy, either; you can use MIDI, OSC, and …IRC chat?

More tutorial videos after the jump, because I really don’t get tired of watching this thing.

That said, watch for about halfway through the video at top for things to start to get interesting. Initially, it’s just some sine waves. “Yeah, whatever… another…” You skip ahead in the transport. Then big clusters of resonators start moving around, which should make at least a few sound designers say, “Hmmm….,” an evil grin appearing in the corner of their mouth.

For fans of similar concepts (MetaSynth springs to mind), I think you’ll like this approach, especially in a world of fake knobs. This is something that actually makes sense for the mouse, and makes me hope we see more Linux tablets soon.

Download source or 32-bit Ubuntu deb.
Don’t miss the awesome about page. “This is nothing new. / Some old men did it in the 60s! / Punched numbers into cards!”

“Modulation? / Bezier on Carrier and Modulator. / Eat that Chowning.”

Thanks to Ryan Dean for the tip!

(PS, no, I’m not personally calling Linux GNU/Linux. I understand why people do. But average people use short names. And the value of GNU is such an integral part of what Linux is — and other OSes, too, by the way, cough, Mac OS — that I think we can celebrate GNU without saying a clunky name. But if you do, carry on…)

MetaSynth has long been something special, a rare tool beloved by sound designers and fans of unusual software for music. The creation of software designer Eric Wenger, creator of the 3D modeling tool Bryce, expressed his unique vision of how computer design could work for sound with interfaces to make synthesis, filtering, and effects more graphical. At the same time, you’d be forgiven for forgetting MetaSynth, as the independently-developed, Mac-only application has been out of the headlines a long time. Imagine my surprise to see Edward Spiegel’s announcement today of a new version.

Superficially, MetaSynth 5 looks the previous version, and I’m sure some people will balk at its US$599 price. But there’s plenty here that sounds truly promising, so I’m eager to give it a test drive in the coming days and weeks. And for MetaSynth loyalists, finally getting proper Intel processor support is a welcome, if long-overdue, development.

In MetaSynth 5:

• Universal Binary, multi-processor enabled — good news, as fancier effects do get CPU-intensive.
• New synthesis Phase distortion, Pulse Width Modulation among eleven new synthesis modes for the instrument framework. Parameters can now be controlled with envelopes and velocity, as well.
• Improved Image Synth: 14 new drawing tools and real-time swapping of instruments, tunings, and samples as you play back, plus batch rendering, which should make previewing and rendering much less of a chore.
• Convolution in the Effects Room: Hmmm… that sounds racy, at least for those of us with a sound design fetish.
• Spectrum manipulation: The Spectrum Synth now lets you select pitch range and adds – whatever this means, I’m stoked – “Time and Pitch Blur.”
• Big files: Render arbitrarily long files, and handle bigger files in the Sample Room.
• Mixing, file support: Mix 24 stereo tracks in the Montage Room, which works with their VTrack video montage editor. There’s also now “native support of .wav, .caf, .aiff and SoundDesigner audio files at resolutions up to 32-bit floating point and 96 kHz.”

As ever, MetaSynth isn’t going to be for everyone, and it’ll be interesting to see how it’s aging. But as one of the cabinet of secret sauce of computer sound tools, you can bet some folks will be taking notice of this new release.

http://uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/ [click the MetaSynth 5 tab for the most relevant new information]