Editing drum patterns in RjDj/Pd from Frank Barknecht on Vimeo.

If making your own musical tools seems like a lot of work, you’re not wrong. The beauty of making your own stuff is all about making your own reusable modules that help you build musical solutions more quickly. Finding those useful modules can also help people new to programming or patching.

In Pure Data, the free and open source cousin of Max/MSP, one form of these reusable modules is called the “abstraction.” It’s an object that you can stick into your creations to help build what you need without a lot of fuss.

Translation: even if you’ve never patched before, you can start making fun drum pattern makers quickly using all-free software. The folks at RjDj, who have been creating mobile interactive toys for the iPhone and iPod touch (see our interview, recent story) have also been building a library of useful abstractions. Because that library is also free and open source and built for Pd, it works with your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine.

Here’s a great starter tutorial, useful for even newcomers:
Editing Drum Patterns in RjDj

For more Pd learning (see additional tips in comments):
Be a Music Geek Ninja with Electronic Music Programming in Pd: New Book

If you create stuff with this, be sure to share with us! And it’s brand new, but feel free to come join our Pd group on the in-alpha/beta Noisepages:
Pd Group

I wish I could be in London in July, but since I can’t, hopefully some readers of this site can make it to the upcoming Music Hackday, which features RjDj and lots of other online music projects (Soundcloud, Last.fm, the music API for The Echo Nest, 7digital, more):
http://musichackday.org/

The beauty of using touch for controllers is flexibility. Sure, you give up tactile feedback – but you can also quickly make your own layouts, make touch controllers an ideal complement to your existing hardware gear (the stuff with physical knobs and faders and pads).

For that reason, we’re all eagerly anticipating an upcoming version of the awesome OSC-based iPhone/iPod touch controller, TouchOSC.

http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

The included layouts are already fantastic, with rotaries and virtual buttons and multi-faders and toggles and X/Y pads. But custom control would be even better. Creator hexler writes CDM with the latest:

The long-awaited update to TouchOSC that will allow for custom layouts has just been submitted for review to Apple,
so I hope that as soon as next week it will be available as a free update to all users on the App Store.

Together with this release (1.3) there will be a free editor application to visually design and upload layouts to the device. You can take a look at the last beta version I published if you want, there’s both Windows and OS X versions available, but I will also prepare a Linux version as soon as possible, of course without the new version of TouchOSC this is but a preview of things to come:

http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-osx.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-win32.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-default-layouts.zip

And nicely enough, the editor is built in cross-platform Java, which I think makes a whole lot of sense. (Go Java, Python, etc., rather than getting stuck in hard-to-port platform-specific stuff like Cocoa.)

Thanks, hexler! I don’t have a video of the new features yet, so instead here’s a nice novelty – the beginnings of a creation using the free SuperCollider (which runs OSC natively) in combination with TouchOSC to make a custom step sequencer. Should fuel other ideas, too:

iPhone users today started downloading the new iPhone OS, 3.0. One interesting feature of the new mobile software is peer-to-peer communication for collaborating in person. If you’re looking for an app that takes advantage of that, and can embarrass you in front of friends / workmates, Smule Trombone could be your answer. The touch-and-breath-controlled social music app/game from synthesis wizard Dr. Ge Wang has a special 3.0-only version. It uses the new iPhone push notification for achievements, but more importantly, features peer-to-peer Bluetooth for in-person “Duet Mode.”

I think these sort of networked features will increasingly become not only a game gimmick, but a necessity in music making. Why shouldn’t music devices instantly recognize the proximity of other music devices, automatically connect, and sync and share data, recordings, clock, and control messages? (One answer why not: because they’re reliving 1980s flashbacks by running MIDI. But that’s no reason software and DIY devices can’t lead the way.)

Meanwhile, whether you care about iPhone ocarinas or not, Smule are on a roll. The Leaf Trombone collaboration features have been racking up stats, with nearly a million sessions judged by other users in six weeks. They aren’t all covers of Nintendo game songs, fun as those may be: over 4,000 original songs from the composer mode have been contributed to the community. There’s cash involved in game achievements, too; you can win US$500 for being “loved” in a new contest.

I also find it interesting that “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” is the top melody with nearly 20,000 performances. It’s proof that some of the innocent joys of music may sometimes get overrated. (Although, let’s see, I still have an hour left to try to bang out a Stravinsky cover on his birthday.)

Go check out the Smule apps here – and here’s hoping we see smart networking in more music apps in general. (Ableton’s Share is one feature we’ll be looking at soon, though open communication standards would be great, too.)

http://www.smule.com/

By the way, on the Android side, it appears Google is planning to re-release the Bluetooth API, so we could get features there, too – and perhaps even Androids talking to iPhones. More on that soon, now that I have some time to get back to coding.

Updated – Bonus Video: Inside the “mind of Smule,” a duet from Legend of Zelda’s Underworld. Can your Computer Music teacher do this? Dr. Ge Wang can:

140 / curtis + thumb piano from m~fischer on Vimeo.

Synthesis geeks are creating some fun sonic toys for the iPhone. There’s no reason you couldn’t plug in an iPod touch or your phone into a mixer and use them in live or studio creations for a little variety. And as mobile platforms grow in capabilities, other platforms should be close behind. (Not to mention, you can always rescue an entire iPod or PDA and run Pd, often for just the few dollars an app costs!)

At top, the granular sampling app Curtis captures sound from a thumb piano. Curtis costs justs a dollar, but allows you to sample, then visually manipulate recorded sound, using granular techniques. A “smooth” synthesis engine is upcoming, but I rather like the lo-fi sound — hope you’ll allow us to switch engines with a toggle. As seen at Synthtopia.

the strange agency [makers of Curtis, other apps]

The app is named for Curtis Roads, who did much of the seminal research into making granular techniques a technical reality. See his book Microsound
for an excellent overview of compositional, historical, acoustical, theoretical, musical, and, well, every possible aspect of this influential sonic practice. Have a look at the documentary on Roads and granular music we saw last month.

Segue – one early practitioner of granular music was Iannis Xenakis!

iGendyn is a new, free mobile application built around the GENeral DYNamic stochastic synthesis approach of Xenakis: “Imagine a set of control points (CPs) which together define the shape of a time domain waveform; with each new cycle through this waveform, their relative positions are updated using probabilistic distributions.” And yes, that’s GENDYN as in General Dynamic – not, in fact, a character from The Lord of the Rings.

Got that? In the default algorithm, X is amplitude, Y determines how quickly you scan through control points to produce the sound, and tilt changes probability. In other words, whether you understand the underlying approach or not (and hearing is always better, anyway), you can tilt your iPhone around and explore networks of probabilistic sounds.

iGendyn Homepage
iTunes App Store Link

Author Dr. Nick Collins is co-editor of The SuperCollider Book, upcoming from MIT Press, as well as The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music. Thanks to Raub Roy for the tip!

Meanwhile, mother of all synth-geeky iPhone apps finally got its 1.1 update approved, so have a go with Jasuto 1.1 for a really terrific look at what modular synthesis could be. Jasuto also has a desktop VST version and the two will be able to integrate, so you have lots of possibilities here.

Automap on other devices – and an iPhone as a remote control for your Live set? Our friend Ben Rogerson at MusicRadar have caught up with the chaps at Novation at a London trade show to have a look at Automap for iPhone. This app hasn’t yet hit the App Store yet – Hispasonic and the Ableton Forums got the jump on the story last month. But it looks appealing.

It seems to auto-detect the computer to which it’s connecting – as it should, folks, look up Zeroconf. (implemented on iPhone as “Bonjour”) And you can learn in both directions – so you can interactively choose parameters on the iPhone and decide what you want to control. It also sends MIDI to Live for clip triggering, though you’ll notice that some features on the APC40, like clip status and the ability to move through blocks of clips, aren’t possible here. Because Automap wraps around VST and AU automation parameters, you also get high-resolution control of plug-in parameters.

This should also open up possibilities for other Automap-supported apps, not just Live; I’ll be able to test this once the app comes out. No official word on availability or pricing other than soon and cheap. Before people start complaining about the tiny iPhone screen — yes, absolutely. But there’s a nice blank spot on the Novation controllers on which you could put your iPhone or iPod touch. Think about it: you can add an intelligent multi-touchscreen to your existing hardware, use your conventional gear for physical control, but keep the Apple gadgetry as an additional remote (now fairly cheap with no contract for iPod touch). You can even wander around the room during sound check while still controlling your set.

Update: I should note, as I just got asked on Twitter, most Wi-Fi adapters allow you to create your own Wi-Fi network. So you don’t need Wi-Fi in a venue. You’d just create your own network on your PC or Mac laptop, and connect via that – the iPhone and iPod touch both support connecting to these networks. (Note that not all devices do: the Android-powered TMobile G1, for instance, has a chip that apparently doesn’t support them, and I have an 802.11b/g USB adapter that won’t create them. But mostly, this is an easy matter.)

Cool as this is, and elegant as the work Novation appears to have done, I can’t help but notice this is still something of a kludge. The iPhone communicates natively over TCP/IP with the computer. That’s what this app is using – but then it needs a Rosetta Stone and another set of software on the computer just to untangle the archaic protocols music software uses (plug-in automation, MIDI, and more oddness heaped atop of MIDI). There’s absolutely no reason that music software couldn’t be intelligent enough to support networking protocols so that all software and devices can easily communicate. That wouldn’t put Novation out of business, either – on the contrary, it would allow them to do their jobs and this very app could be more productive. Instead of MIDI CC numbers, imagine if you could refer to clips by scene and position number, or even by clip name. Imagine if the iPhone displayed clip parameters and changed when clips were launched. Imagine no more drivers or software to install: someone who bought Novation hardware with OSC support could bring it to a friend’s place and work on a session without that friend installing Automap software.

(singing) You may say I’m a dreamer, but … (sorry, cough) actually this is all possible right now.

I’m all for solutions that work, and Automap (and M-Audio’s HyperControl) both have great capabilities now. But OpenSoundControl is also something you can implement now (provided hosts like Live will support it), and we’ll be talking more about what it can do over the summer to make it more practical and less abstract.