Strange Agency have been around the iOS world for a long time now, and in that time they’ve brought some truly unique and innovative apps to users. Some of my favourites have been Donut (which I still use on occasion), and CP1919. To be fair, The Strange Agency’s output has been much more sporadic of late, which is fine, and understandable, but they’re still putting out new things, and now we have Soup Granular, a retro future app inspired by the oil can delays of the 60s and also by the strange agency’s previous granular explorations, Curtis™ and Spunk™.
Soup brings you a virtual magnetic fluid that you can record onto, slosh around, and play back from. You can use it as a unique delay effect or more like a granular synthesizer, concocting your own wholly novel sounds.
Here’s what The Strange Agency have to say about Soup:
Quantum Sound
Soup breaks up recordings into individual sound quanta with which you can interact as if they made up an audio fluid. They can be played linearly or randomly, forward, backward, or even sideways. They can, moreover, be stirred together, giving a whole new meaning to mixing sound.
Sounds Touching
Not only is this an extremely visual audio experience, it’s terrifically tactile as well. With support for multi-touch, Soup lets you get in there and mangle the fluid in a way that’s simply not possible with knobs and faders.
Audio Palette
Soup will let you literally paint with sound. You can record external sounds through the microphone or import WAV files, slathering sound over the virtual fluid. Then your fingers can become play heads, reading back the sounds from any position, or multiple positions at once.
Already people have been asking about AB3, IAA, AuV3 etc. Which are questions worth asking. However, Strange Agency don’t have plans to add these capabilities, and the main reason is that Soup was conceived as a standalone app and, between the fluid simulation and the granular synth, it uses just about 100% of the CPU on most iPads. Which is fair enough. However, you can easily open WAV files from the Files app, Dropbox, etc., and you can share Soup recordings as well.
Soup Granular costs $9.99 on the app store now