Ah, Mondays. If you’re looking for a way to brighten your work week and you’ve got an iPod touch or iPhone you can drop into your pocket, iOS music and audio developer Pulse Code tells us they’ve made four of its apps free for this week only, through August 8. That includes BtBx [iTunes], a simple and fun drum machine, DB-303, a simulation of the Roland TB-303 bass line synth and a particular favorite of pocket iPhone musicians, as well as a couple of fun toys – a robot tone synth and sound effects maker called Android FX and a text-to-speech “robot comedian.” These will all run on iPad, too, of course, though none has yet been adapted to iPad’s native resolution.
The development house has also just released on a couple of other (paid) apps, including a fascinating-looking graphical subtractive synth called PolyWave. It works with some similar ideas to the hardware proposed with our Dreams contest, in which you draw the sounds you want. And on the subject of transforming voices – a topic we covered last week on Android and desktop, there’s a new vocal transformer.
The microphone input itself on mobile devices is an interesting one. It becomes a sound source, a modulation source, and a controller. (It’s not hard to add to hardware projects, too – DIYers, take note.)
Developer Amaury Hazan, a former developer of the interactive music app RjDj, writes to say he’s just finished his PhD thesis (ah, that… yeah, working on it), and that some of his doctoral research helped lead to a new iOS app. We covered that research some years ago here on CDM, and now it’s found its way into a new “beatboxing” app, which uses your voice as an input to sequence sounds. It’s a fascinating idea, if one that may require some practice. You can see the technique in the video above, or go grab the app for iOS at US$2.
http://billaboop.com/en/boomclap
iTunes link
A nice Wire to the Ear write-up
I’d love to talk to Amaury – and anyone else, if interested – about research in using mic inputs, so consider this a teaser and conversation starter.