The Week of Deep Apple Electronic Music Patent Mysteries continues! Behold as Apple submits a patent for — as near as observers can tell — detuning oscillators with common beats. Let’s switch to synthesis 101 for a second. Detune two oscillators, and destructive interference between them will create beats. Apple’s patent claim: “The present invention relates to a music synthesizer and a method of generating a synthesizer output with a constant beat.”

1. A method comprising: generating a constant beat parameter; adding the constant beat parameter to a pitch signal to derive an input for a first oscillator; and combining an output of the first oscillator and an output of a second oscillator to generate a music synthesizer output with a substantially constant beat.

2. A method as in claim 1, further comprising: deriving an input for the first oscillator from a linear pitch control signal.

3. A method as in claim 2, further comprising: combining a detune parameter with the linear pitch control signal.

Patent: Music synthesizer and a method of generating a synthesizer output with a constant beat

The patent, in other words, covers a basic synthesis technique, and that’s raised some controversy as this patent has spread online among synth geeks: why would anyone want to patent something so basic?

Remember patent 0060026536? It’s the multi-touch, gestural patent Apple filed that was clearly the precursor of the Apple iPhone. Here’s the curious thing: the iPhone, as demonstrated at the Macworld keynote, isn’t all that focused on multi-touch. With the exception of Apple’s clever zooming gesture, most gestures are single-touch. Most are horizontal and vertical strokes similar to what you can already do on laptop touchpads.

A lot of what gets put into patents never shows up in shipping products, but I would be very surprised if Apple’s multi-touch abilities didn’t start to spread to new stuff. Touchscreens and eventually multi-touchscreens are likely to appear on more computers, PC and Mac alike. And other devices have likely lacked touchscreens only because the digitizer hardware — and the processors to deal with tracking multiple touches — hadn’t yet reached the right economy of scale, something that’s likely to happen soon (the iPhone in June being a good indicator). Phones have the advantage of subsidies from the phone carriers — the iPhone would presumably cost hundreds more if it didn’t have Cingular reducing the cost to get you on a 2-year plan. But the touch trend is likely to continue.

And that brings us back to the original patent. Could Apple in fact be working on a music mixer or other touch-enabled music interface? Or was this just a demonstration of an idea they had, and not a working product? Time will tell. I’ll repeat my concerns: touch is great in its flexibility, but losing tactile feedback is not — maybe something Apple themselves have discovered. But that’s unlikely to stop manufacturers from integrating touch into products for musicians in the near future, whether it’s Apple or someone else. And it won’t just be the Lemur.

Okay, no remaining stories this week will have headlines in the form of a question; I promise. “NAMM: New DJ Hardware????”

Apple’s iPhone prototype is a beautiful culmination of user interface design and industrial/product design. But the core of the product really is its multi-touch interface, which should gratify readers of this site. Almost from the moment this site was founded, you’ve advocated the possibilities of touch and multi-touch interfaces. CDM first covered the JazzMutant Lemur (later distributed by Max/MSP powerhouse Cycling ‘74) in November 2004, and readers of CDM were pouring over the interface possibilities of multi-touch as revealed in Apple’s patents back in February, along with experimental, projected multi-touch interfaces and even Windows multi-touch.

Musicians, after all, understand the importance of physical interfaces — it’s the essence of musical performance, and anyone who works with MIDI is intimate with the process of translating gestures into numbers.

So now the iPhone is (almost) here. It’s a brilliant design that, unlike my Windows Mobile-based UT Starcom VX6700, seems to actually understand what a phone is.

With months left until release, a lot could change. But, while I’m very excited about the iPhone’s design, two major questions concern me:

1. Will Apple lock down the iPhone, blocking Flash, Java, custom widgets, and open development from its new platform?

2. Could Apple’s multi-touch patents actually stifle growth of new, interactive displays?

While a lot of CDMers looked at iPhone and thought “that’d make a nifty music controller”, a possibility that now seems more remote, these questions of course have much deeper implications. So, with everyone else to ooh and ahh over Apple’s as-yet-unreleased phone (check out the hilarious faux unboxing), I get the chance to play skeptic.