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.

Sometimes, looking back at pioneers can be nostalgic. “Back in my day,” goes the story, “electronic composers were real electronic composers.” But then you hear from someone like Curtis Roads, and his mind-blowing ideas are coupled with a belief that we’re only now reaching the Golden Age of electronic sounds. Rory Ahearn writes to share the latest episode of the show Motherboard on VBS TV, which talks to composer Curtis Roads. Roads was ground-breaking in his early granular synthesis work in the 1970s as he continues to be today.

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

The song “Daisy Bell” has a special place in computer history. Max Mathews, who had by the late 50s pioneered digital synthesis using IBM 704 mainframe, arranged the tune in 1961 for vocoder-derived vocal synthesis technology on technology developed by John Larry Kelly, Jr.. Kelly himself is better known for applying number theory to investing in the markets — an unfortunate achievement in the wake of a financial collapse brought down by misuse of mathematical theory.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke happened to hear the 704 singing the Mathews/Kelly “Daisy Bell,” and the rest is (fictional) history – the HAL computer in the book and movie sings the song as he is being disconnected, as though the computer had learned this song as a “child.”

Here’s Max himself (namesake for Max, the patching language), overseeing a rendition of his arrangement:

Delia Derbyshire, UK electronic composer extraordinaire and BBC Radiophonic Veteran, inspires depths of love and respect from us electronic muzos male and female that defy description. As Tara Busch from AnalogSuicide puts it, people aren’t just fans: they’re Delians. I think if you could see the image inside the heads of Delia fans at the mere mention of her name or the sound of a single sound effect, it’d probably look something like this slow-motion clip Tara posted to AnalogSuicide last fall:

(Well, the editor at the BBC working on the show obviously felt that way.)

Via: We Love Delia! More Delia Derbyshire Deliciousness! [Analog Suicide]

I think people’s passions run this deep not simply out of a mad Delian crush, but also because of what she represents for the future of electronic music: Delia Derbyshire seemed to embrace sound with a relentless freshness and playfulness, the kind of spirit that could move forward the future of music in the same way she invigorated its past. And she came out of an entire scene of experimentation at the BBC and in the UK that could now spread virally online and in radiophonic workshops of independent musicians’ own creation.

Darren Landrum on Twitter is nice enough to send along two three newly-posted 1997 interviews with Delia on Radio Scotland. First part above; second part below. In YouTube bizarro fashion, they’re accompanied with strange sweeping slide shows, but Delia’s bubbling personality and insight shine through.

But perhaps you want to wear your Delian adoration on your sleeve, literally. Well, Analog Industries created a t-shirt this morning that, by the time Tom Whitwell (once and future Music thing creator) and myself Twittered and forum commenters posted, is now gone. Look out, Urban Outfitters.

Anyone want to try alternative Derbyshire couture? (Delia Derbyshirts?) Let us know; I have some screenprinting connections.

Part two of the interview:

AutoTune, easily the most famous software plug-in in history – one even the general public has heard of – continues to reach mainstream, viral audiences. But the surprise is, originally its number crunching powers were applied to geology, oil, and pipelines, not bad vocalists. (Sadly, the latter are a more renewable resource.)

This week, the Web is buzzing over the music video of AutoTune, the (parody) song.

Sadly, this video could have been so much more – not even so much as a Cher reference, really? (Cher’s producers: AutoTuning way before Kanye West, and then lying about it! Brilliant!)

For a bit of AutoTune reflection and history:

Read the 1999 Sound on Sound article in which the producers tried to fool people into thinking they used a Digitech Talker vocoder, which, come to think of it, sounds like it would have actually been a pretty decent idea, anyway. That story is now updated with the correction. I’m sure the producers are relatively sorry about it certain they can’t get away with it any more / it’s hardly a trade secret.

Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a thoughtful article on AutoTune for The New Yorker earlier this year. Best bit:

Someone once asked Hildebrand if Auto-Tune was evil. He responded, “Well, my wife wears makeup. Is that evil?” Evil may be overstating the case, but makeup is an apt analogy: there is nothing natural about recorded music.

That much is true. Of course, it begs the question: does his wife smear lipstick randomly over her forehead? Can you actually see her face? You see my point.

Perhaps feeling the pressure of free tuning and vocal plug-ins now shipping with many audio apps and DAWs, Antares have introduced Auto-Tune efx, a US$99, simplified version of the plug-in for Mac and Windows now available exclusively at Guitar Center. Oddly, a selling point is that it currently comes with a free iLok; given that it’s targeted at beginning users who likely would be shocked that they have to pay extra to use DRM added to a program, that seems like not something one would advertise. (Wow! Thanks!)

In Antares’ defense, though, no, I don’t think AutoTune is evil. In fact, I think ironically, it’s drawn attention to some of the potential fictions of recording – and, through the magic of reverse psychology, made a great case for making changes to the actual vocals and using the computer for more creative tasks rather than seeing it as a panacea for fixing human beings.

Antares also does produce software that can be used to creative effect, like the AVOX2 toolkit and its mutating effects.

To me, the most interesting (and overlooked) thing about AutoTune is its roots in seismology and geophysical data. Yep, that’s right: founder Andy Hildebrand got his start at Exxon doing things like looking for failure points in pipelines. He went on to study composition at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music, and used his smarts in seismology to solve musical problems.

For more on that history, read the 1999 awards citations in the newsletter of the Society of Exploration Geophysicists [PDF], recognizing Hildebrand. (I love search engines.)

So, knock AutoTune if you like: what it demonstrates is the flexibility of digital algorithms. In fact, the beauty of computers is that they don’t worry about issues like taste or the difference between music and underground oil. And that means you can take a tool and apply it to a radically different job – giving us human beings near endless potential in how we interpret digital tools.

And that suggests that you ought to be able to use AutoTune and your voice and do something that isn’t awful at all.