In the latest take on sonifying data in musical form, iPhone app Astro Cantus plots star data from the universe as musical notes. It turns the the sphere of heavens above the Earth into a massive piano roll.

Co-founding developer Rocky Alvey, according to the creators, dismantled a music box as a kid, and that music box notion (yet again) is a big part of the concept here. What’s notable is that the app’s sonification does indeed represent not only the stars themselves but some of the data – spectra of the stars are translated into pitch. And there are a lot of stars in there.

The musical representation itself is a bit limited: you get either chimes or a piano playing a pentatonic mode, and some control over spectrum and magnitude. Speaking as a composer who has occasionally played with it, that’s the challenge with this sort of work: making musical paradigms represent the data is no small obstacle. But the developers also say this is just a (very pleasing) first step, with more interactive features and live modes and additional sounds and scales to come.

http://astrocantus.com/
US$1.99 on the App Store

Amusingly, I’m writing this as my KCRW music stream is playing Bill Frisell’s cover of The Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” Which is more compelling as a commentary on the world? I’m not sure.

Nothing’s gonna to change my world.

Thanks to West Latta for the link; via TreeHugger’s Jaymi Heimbuch:
iPhone App Creates Music from Stars and Galaxies

We hear your opinions in comments (sometimes loudly). Now it’s time to be counted. Which computing platforms do you own, and which do you use for music – desktop Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile iOS, Linux, Android? We’re not interested in what you don’t want to see (sorry, trolls), but we do want to know what you want to see more of. Connecting to the platforms you care about is important to CDM. This isn’t a popularity contest – I always enjoy the chance to write to an underserved minority. But it is a chance for us to look at who’s out there, and we’ll share the results. (It’s been a couple of years since our last survey, and a lot has happened.)

I’m not offering an incentive for this survey, for fear it might bias the results, but tell your CDM reading friends to answer – it’s democracy in action.

Answer now… Survey closes 11:59pm Sunday, August 8!

Direct link: [mobile device-friendly for iPhone/Android/etc.]
http://cdm.platform.sgizmo.com/s3/

Want to register your vote on the visual side? See our parallel survey for Create Digital Motion.

Embedded survey below. (RSS readers will likely need to click through to the site.)

Good news: Masayuki Akamatsu, the brilliant Max/MSP developer who first bridged the popular modular audio and multimedia environment to the Wii remote (see aka.wiiremote), is on the case. It’s still early in development, and for now is an extremely simple implementation: it only routes buttons and text on a Safari webpage to a Max/MSP patch. What’s cool is that it uses the OpenSoundControl (OSC) protocol to do it (with PHP on the Web end), and it works (you can even use it now if you’ve got an iPhone):

aka.iphone Preview
Discussion on the Cycling ’74 Forums

Let’s talk about what this is not: it’s not multi-touch. In fact, if you want buttons for an interface, you could use a US$20 numeric keypad. This helps demonstrate just how little Apple has done to support development on their iPhone. The multi-touch capabilities are reserved by the Safari browser for zooming, and not much else. Given that interface design and gestures are a big part of the iPhone formula, that means everyone is missing out on one of the important capabilities of the phone. Given that the rest of the mobile phone industry is going to be gunning for Apple’s phone in the coming months, I’m holding out hope — even if faint — that Apple will open up this aspect of their phones. Supporting music and visual artists isn’t, and shouldn’t, be high on Apple’s priority list for iPhone. But the entire development community could help differentiate the iPhone with better access to hardware input.

In the meantime, what this is is another demonstration of how cool Masayuki is, and how great it is that Max/MSP/Jitter makes it possible to do this stuff. There’s lots of discussion of open source/free software, and rightfully so. But part of openness is also extensibility, and it’s something proprietary software can benefit from, as well. Max/MSP is the definition of an extensible proprietary platform — musicians and artists can create powerful custom tools and even code their own objects using the same interface as the developer. For everything else, we’ll just have to keep hacking.

(Thanks to vade for spotting this before I did, over on Create Digital Motion.)