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.

SuperCollider, super fast: UK-based experimental musician mcldx has produced a 60-second intro to SuperCollider. Naturally, you won’t learn SuperCollider in one minute, but what’s nice about this is it does explain the very first steps you would take to get SuperCollider running – and because SC doesn’t have a single-window, “do everything here” interface, that first step actually confuses a lot of people.

Have a look, and you’ll at the very least understand step one. From there, you can start diving into tutorials and making other sounds. SuperCollider will repay an investment of time: it’s an elegant language, runs a really efficient synthesis engine, works with OpenSoundControl natively (and now even builds its UI in Java’s Swing for cross-platform compatibility), and has some incredibly powerful tools for things like manipulating live sequences.

You’ll find additional help built into the tool. Some quick platform-specific notes:

• Linux: On Ubuntu, check out the nice integration with gedit, the default GNOME editor. It makes SuperCollider feel a little like Processing.
• Mac: Apparently Safari 4 beta is causing trouble with the online help editor if opened from the menu.
• Windows: I couldn’t get any love from the 3.2 build on Vista (sound driver problems), so I tried 3.3 “alpha” – and found the alpha perfectly stable, and an easier install.

http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/

Via fritcrate’s hackday blog.

Now, I think we should apply this to other things, but even faster – like ten-seconds:

• Ableton Live: Okay, see those rectangles? Put things on them! Trigger them!
• Sibelius: Just keep clicking “next” on the wizard, then eighth note, then type note names look for the blue arrow click and keep typing!
• Max/MSP and Pd: Quick, add a – box and connect to other boxes. Toggle bang metro 30 now you have a metronome!
• ChucK: Ummmm…. “SinOsc s => dac;”?
• Processing: setup, draw, size 800 by 600, and erm, line(0,0,mouseX,mouseY) and screw around for a while.
• A Yamaha DX7: Okay… plug this in and… jeez, I don’t remember button sequences. Try to find presets? Play something?
• A Moog Modular: Jacks. Knobs. Cables. Now go. It’ll sound awful and you’ll run out of cables. But you’ll have a great time.

Other suggestions welcome.

Tweet A Sound: getting started tutorial from Andrew Spitz on Vimeo.

You probably think of social networking and messaging as being about text, about saying things like “Wow, this tuna salad sandwich I’m having for lunch is delicious!” But the next Tweet you get on Twitter could be a synthesis preset.

Say what?

Working in Max/MSP, Andrew Spitz has developed a tool called Tweet a Sound. It uses Twitter as a communications platform for “social sound design.” Instead of just saying, “Wow, I be makin’ phat basslines,” you can actually share the sound. Whip up a sound using typical FM synth parameters and Max/MSP’s sound engine, then click “send.” You’ll send a string of numbers to your Twitter account, confusing those friends not in the know. But other users will be able to grab and play with your sound.

Andrew even encourages synthesis n00bs to play without fear – grab those envelopes and mysterious-looking settings and see what comes out. So, I hope you synth geeks do share this with some friends new to synthesis, as I think they’ll have a great time.

Right now, Tweet a Sound is Mac-only; we just need someone to save a Windows standalone version. Someone has asked about a Pd port, but let’s put it this way: this is the tip of a very, very big iceberg of sharing. It’s something worth considering in anything you’re doing, not just with Twitter, but whether you can provide networked capabilities in whatever you’re happening to build.

Ableton, of course, recently added the Share functionality to Live. But with open APIs and basic networking protocols, there’s no reason you can’t explore other features. Why not build a drum machine that lets you collaborate with one of your friends on your IM list, or a sequencer that automatically posts ideas as you revise them? Just doing these things for the sake of it could be a waste of time, but on the other hand, these social features could turn Web 2.0 sites into places that actually inspire you to make and share music rather than distract you with mundane activities.

I love the idea; let us know if you have some fun with it.

Tweet A Sound { sound + software } [Andrew Spitz Blog]

Sound is a wonderful, if invisible thing. To work with these tiny fluctuations in air pressure that make up what we hear, we always work with some sort of software metaphor. So why not make that metaphor pixels – and why not manipulate the visual element directly?

Translating between sound and image is not a new concept in music software. The deepest tool for these functions is unquestionably the Mac-only classic MetaSynth, which sprang from the imagination of Bryce creator and graphic designer Eric Wenger. To me, one of the most appealing features of MetaSynth has always been its filter tool, the one component that allows you to work directly with sound using imagery and painting tools. The core of the tool, however, turns images into a score for synthesis, which opens up powerful features for microtones and the like but can conversely make simply designing sounds more challenging. (Side note: Leopard users, read this re: MetaSynth.)

Photosounder looks like MetaSynth, but it more directly translates between sound and image. It also has a uniquely straightforward interface for precisely adjusting controls and mappings. Put these together, and you can really use Photosounder as an audio tool. That opens up not only experimental techniques, but even makes conventional tasks more accessible.

Photosounder is also under very active development, with recent additions like a lossless mode for better sound fidelity and loop modes. The result is a really compelling looking tool for audio manipulation.

What can you do with these pixel powers over sound? Users have been experimenting and posting some pretty impressive stuff:

• Isolating and removing individual instruments – making this an ideal remixing and sampling tool – using Photoshop
• Making entire tracks from photographs (which, again, was possible with MetaSynth as infamously employed by Aphex Twin, but sounds very different here)
• Processing using Photoshop filters
• Making beats by drawing
• Extreme time processing

Photosounder is currently Windows-only, but Linux and Mac versions are promised. (By the way, I think that’s going to become more commonplace as savvy developers take up cross-platform development tools, toolchains, and frameworks.)

It’s cheap enough to impulse-buy, too, at EUR25 non-commercial or EUR99 commercial.

http://photosounder.com/

Photosounder examples (with video)

I hope to get my hands on Photosounder and show off some features with this soon. Thanks to everyone who sent this in! (And yeah, after four or five people I finally get around to mentioning it!)

The best way to see what’s possible: check out the videos. Here’s a selection of my favorites:

Smule, the folks who brought simulated Ocarina to the iPhone, are now thinking multiplayer. Instead of just playing a machine or a few of your friends as in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, Smule’s latest app turns your creations into a reality show with online judging. And the killer app itself? It’s a simulated, touch trombone.

It’s pretty wacky stuff, but Smule’s had some hits on their hands already, so I think the wackiness may be part of their secret. And it comes from a heavy hitter: Dr. Ge Wang, the founder, is also a professor at Stanford’s CCARMA research center, director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLORK to the East Coast’s PLORK), and creator of the ChucK Programming Language.

New in this version:

• Teaching tools: Floating leaves guide first-time musicians to learn songs in “self tutorial” mode, and a browser-based composition tool helps teach you to compose.
• Global judging: Online audiences can judge songs with emoticons and text and a 1-10 scale. Everything is integrated with the app itself (see image). Tromboning with the Stars, anyone?
• The Power of Silliness: The most important feature, though, may be that everyone sounds a little goofy playing it, which can actually be liberating. As Dr. Ge Wang puts it, “It’s like singing in the shower.” Well, except with judges.

The app is simple, but the concept I think is pretty remarkable. We’ve seen interactive instruments, and we’ve seen music games. By adding the judging element, though, this is a free-form instrument that can also be a game. Now, without getting too ahead of ourselves, you could do the same thing with a Worldwide Online Kazoo Contest. In fact, maybe that’s a great idea. I suppose you could say music itself can be a kind of social game, played out on a stage. But nonetheless, making it an iPhone app can help free people up to get that message.

Oh, yeah, and got any doubts about the business model for open source? ChucK is a completely free, ridiculously powerful programming language for synthesis. It’s infinitely deeper than Leaf Trombone. But that power, packaged for a broad audience, can become a hit business – and likely to be popular well beyond musicians. If that’s possible, I imagine more could be soon. Remember, too, that whatever the Apple fanboys tell you, the iPhone is not a dominant mobile platform – nowhere close. Apple’s proprietary hardware means it isn’t really intended to be.

I hope someone working on platforms like Symbian and Google Android takes note: pack in geeky, nuclear-powered synthesis features, and people will find ways to put them to use in consumer apps that appeal to everyone. Leave them out, and you miss the boat. Or the trombone, anyway.

Direct iTunes App Link [99 cents]

http://smule.com/

Now, some very amusing videos of this thing in action: