I recently bought an iPad for the primary purpose of exploring the device’s potential as an experimental musical instrument. After about a week of research, I’ve discovered some very promising and creative software that suggests that the iPad can indeed function as a very powerful means of sound control and exploration. However, I was surprised how difficult it was, amidst the glut of cheesy emulations of acoustic instruments and instant techno beat machines, to find apps designed for experimental purposes. So, in the humble hope of aiding like-minded seekers, I offer this small guide to some of the best apps, according to the criteria of conceptual originality and musical open-endedness.
TC-11 ($29.99): Although there are some very impressive “playable” apps out there, such as Geo Synthesizer, SynthTronica, and Animoog, most of these virtual instruments model familiar interfaces such as the keyboard or some approximation thereof, proving Marshall McLuhan’s point that the content of new media is old media. This cannot be said of TC-11, however, which is the most brilliantly conceived music app in terms of the unique affordances offered by the iPad. The instrument is played on the touchscreen, simply enough, but the actual sounds created in response to the player’s touch are determined by the patch parameters. Virtually every aspect of the sound can be controlled by any imaginable spatial mapping on the touch pad (plus the gyroscope and accelerometer), generating a mind-boggling array of performance possibilities. The TC-11 lends itself especially well to distended noise, but it can be played more conventionally as well: the pitch can readily be quantized according to any scale you like.
Droneo ($2.99): Very neat little app for creating rich, slowly evolving drone textures. It allows you to fine tune the individual frequencies outside of equal temperament, and has some very nice built in samples. The parameters can be tweaked in a number of ways, allowing you to actually “compose” your drone with some sophistication.
SoundyThingie ($2.99): This unfortunately named app is actually quite cool, taking a widely used concept—converting graphical patterns into sound— and doing something more creative with it. You can make complex branching structures of lines, each of which corresponds to a tone whose pitch varies according to its vertical position. Individual waveform assignments and the possibility of altering the play speed and timing make for a subtly complex instrument.
DrawJong ($2.99): One of many apps that combine sound and visuals, DrawJong is “a two-oscillator FM/wave terrain synthesizer based on chaotic attractors. It is capable of producing wild glitches and weird waveforms, along with a steady stream of gorgeous visuals.” A sensory feast for eye and ear.
Glitch Machine ($2.99): It was reading about this app that inspired me to take the leap into iPad land. Glitch Machine is a live-coding environment that uses reverse Polish notation to render a constant output of luscious low-bit noise. Actually coding with any intelligence is way beyond me at this point (and the relationship between code and output is highly obscure), but you can do a lot simply by trial and error, and the potential of this app is staggering. It also allows you to easily save and export your work.
WaveShaper ($5.99): Load up a sample and use two fingers on the X-Y pad to mangle the hell out of it in real time. A very clean design and lots of fun to play.
MendelSynth ($1.99): A simple but very clever concept: each circle represents a sound—noisy or harmonic, static or varied—and by “breeding” two sounds, you create a set of offspring that are genetic mutations of their parents’ sonic qualities. It’s a neat and intuitive way of exploring electronic sound. Not playable as an instrument, but you can email your favorite sounds to yourself for later use.
NotePlex ($1.99): Notes are created as nodes on a vast, scalable grid. Pitch is determined not by placement on the grid, but rather by color. Nodes are activated by pulsars, which emit pulses regularly according to the tempo setting. Each node also has a setting which determines how it conveys the pulses it receives—it can send more pulses in all directions, or just one, or none at all. Plus, each node can be given a life-span, that is, the number of times it can be activated before disappearing. NotePlex can be used to create highly complex generative compositions that evolve in unpredictable ways. The built-in sounds are unspectacular, but you can import your own samples.
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ($1.99): This devilishly clever little program shows how much can be done with a simple concept. Set loose the 26 letters of the alphabet onto the playing surface and listen to them interact according to four different spatial and sonic behavior patterns. If the result is instant avant-garde vocal music circa 1970 (think Berio or Kagel), it’s nonetheless a lot of fun to play around with, and a gentle introduction to experimental sound for the unsuspecting.
Anything by Nicholas Collins: His apps are among the best, and many of them are free. (They are unfortunately developed for iPhone, so they’re not ideal for iPad, but they work.) Some focus on live coding in which the user manipulates symbolic objects whose relationship to sonic output is tantalizingly opaque (TOPLAPapp, RISCy, Cryptoclash); others use samples (BBCut, Concat) or photos (Photo Noise, Photo OSC) as the basis for sound experimentation. Collins’ iGENDYN is a lovely multitouch implementation of Iannis Xenakis’ dynamic stochastic synthesis.
Finally, an honorable mention should go out to the following apps: Nanoloop, Soundrop, A Noise Machine, Runxt Life, Monnix, VirtualSynth, and AirVox.
Have I overlooked anything? Please share your favorites in the comments.
January 19, 2012, 10:42pm
