The result page gives hex codes for each color, which can then be copied and emailed to a friend or colleague. Very enjoyable even if you aren’t designing something.
• Coolors (coolors.co)
]]>Giant poster ads are bad enough. But they’re even worse when they suddenly come to life and attack you. As far as terrifying pranks go, this one is pretty high up there. And it just keeps getting better.
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It’s been asked over and over again: can a simpler software tool attract more people to music making? But the next question is, invariably – what’s the right stuff to leave out?
Auxy, released today, is an extreme exercise in app minimalism. It radically reduces what’s in the UI by focusing on making and cueing patterns — and leaving out the rest.
It’s also free.
Built exclusively for iPad, Auxy centers on a grid as its main screen. You’ve got four tracks in which you can create, edit, then trigger different patterns. Tap on one rectangle, and you draw in patterns in a familiar “piano roll” sequencer view. Drag notes to draw, then drag to move or elongate them. It’s even easy for clumsy or large fingers.
Each pattern is one, two, or four bars. There’s a drum kit with three sets of sounds, a bass track with four sounds, and two synth tracks with a choice of five sounds. Tapping a circular icon on the left brings up clever draggable knobs for controlling a filter, volume, and (in all but the drum kit) one sound parameter.
The basic functionality is clearly borrowed from Ableton Live. Each column is a track, and can trigger just one pattern at a time. Playback is quantized to the bar. There’s even a stop button at the top of each column.
It’s all so obvious, that you’d be forgiven for thinking this exists already. Weirdly, it doesn’t. You can try an experiment: open up Apple’s GarageBand on iOS and see how long it takes you to get to this same editing view. I stumbled around the UI for a couple of minutes before I found it, and once I got there, tapping tiny icons apparently supposed to represent the piano roll editor and puzzling over what a pencil toggle with a lock meant, I realized it’s nothing like Auxy. My feeling that I had seen Auxy before was more to do with a sense that this is how touch piano rolls shouldwork, more than how they generally do.
So, combining this sort of editor with Live-style triggering is great. The problem is, that’s where the app ends. It’s almost as easy to write a missing feature list as a feature list – even if that’s by design:
You can’t record external audio.
You can’t play in patterns – you can only drag in notes in the piano roll.
You can’t sequence other apps.
You’re limited to a small handful of sounds, and always drums, bass, synth, synth.
You can’t change time signatures.
You can’t export patterns as MIDI.
You can export audio. Tap the record button in the upper left-hand corner, and Auxy lets you live record an arrangement by triggering different clips. When you’re done, you’re given an option to save the audio to iTunes, copy it to another app with AudioCopy, or use iOS 8′s new share functionality (which connects to AirDrop and other apps you’ve installed, like Dropbox).
Using audio export, you can find some use for the app. The developers of Auxy clearly have some talented friends, and so in addition to the slick demo video, you can listen to a whole track made in the app:
I love the minimalism, in that it makes an app that’s uncommonly friendly to beginners. But just allowing an easy point of entry isn’t enough to make software a success: you need a compelling reason to keep using it.
And I can’t help but feel that Auxy isn’t just minimal: it’s a beautiful tool, but it falls just short of some real-world use after an initial play. If it worked with inter-app MIDI, it might become my go-to pattern maker for the various interesting synths you can now collect on iOS. If it exported MIDI (or, as KORG recently showed, Ableton sessions), it could be the perfect mobile idea recorder. That’d be doubly true if there were an iPhone version; that seems a missed opportunity with this compact interface, especially with roomier iPhones 6.
And I don’t think that’s just because I’m a “pro” user. The typical non-producer musician often cares more about mic input than us electronic folks – because they sing, or play guitar, for instance. Once you have something with a mic input, it becomes more personal.
Stockholm-based developer Henrik Lenberg, a veteran of SoundCloud and Propellerhead, is evangelical in his commitment to Auxy and its less-is-more approach. I think the key question is what happens in its next revision.
It’s easy to see how so many music creation tools have become massive bundles of features: even beginners and amateur musicians often cover a wide gamut of use cases. Finding a narrower set of features that still appeals to a broad range of people is a bigger challenge.
But I don’t think Auxy has really tackled that challenge yet. As version 1.0, Auxy is a compelling demonstration of design discipline. If that discipline can be applied to providing a broader range of possible sounds, and some ability to use Auxy as a sketchpad for other music (with MIDI and Ableton export, for instance), I think it could be a landmark tool. For now, less is less – but it could be more.
Auxy is a free app, so grab it now and watch it grow.
The post Auxy Is The Best Piano Roll Editor for iPad Yet – And Not Much Else – By Design [Free] appeared first on Create Digital Music.
]]>]]>MIDI file by Don Carroll.
This old 24-pin dot matrix printer has been converted into a MIDI compatible sound generator. Up to 21 notes can be played simultaneously. It features up to 16 MIDI channels with individual volume and pitch. Key velocity for every note played is also implemented.
An Atmega8 and an FPGA are connected to various parts of the original printer main board. The Atmega handles the incoming MIDI messages, communicates with the FPGA and drives the stepper motors for the print head and paper feed. The FPGA is configured to generate lots of pulse-width modulation signals with independent frequency and duty cycle to drive the individual printer pins.
The external electronics and the printer main board are connected using a normal centronics printer cable and an additional 9-pin connector (the printer cable did not have enough wires).
The electronics features a standard MIDI DIN connector which is connected to a USB-MIDI converter. It’s possible to connect a MIDI keyboard instead of the PC and play live.
The Atmega firmware responds to all 16 MIDI channels, but this can be reduced to certain channels if the printer is supposed to play together with other sound generators.
The FPGA is a Xilinx Spartan-3E on a development board (“Spartan-3E Starter Kit”). It is pretty much oversized for the application of generating 21 PWM signals but it’s what I had available.
The original printing frequency was approx. 1kHz with a pulse width of 300µs. So every pin hit the paper at maximum 1000 times per second when printing stuff. The MIDI electronics drives this from a few Hz up to 2kHz.
When the pulse width is reduced the sound gets quieter because the pin hits the paper with less force. This way “channel volume” and “key velocity” are implemented.
“Collaborative Cooking” is a project initiated and created by Christian Isberg, Petter Johansson Kukacka Lasse Korsgaard and Carl Berglöf project. The project is based on a digital platform that controls and operates a machine for quick cooking. This innovative project examines the possibilities of cooking a new and innovative way.
Ableton Live has become one of the foremost DAW’s for electronic music production…but creating breathtaking soundscapes and out of this world ‘drops’ aren’t the only thing it can do.
Meet Nils Iver Holtar, a game developer and musician based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning in the late ’80s with classic NES titles, Nils was inspired by the soundtracks of video games and considers them a foundation of his musical endeavors. While earning his Master’s degree in Game Design at the IT University of Copenhagen, he began to experiment with the idea of music being more than just an aesthetic, background element in gaming. What if the music could directly alter and be altered by the flow of gameplay?
This led him to create Audioverdrive: a coupling of a simple space-shooter built for the iPad and Ableton Live. Nils wrote a mapping program that allowed him to use Ableton as a game-scripting tool; he could then use elements in Ableton such as kicks, snares, and pitch as signals to inform the behavior of the shooter and it’s environment. The soundtrack of the game is created in real-time, shifting according to the in-game action.
This might sound a bit complicated, but rest assured, this is a major breakthrough in both gaming and music technology. For more information on how Audioverdrive works, check out the video below and make sure to peep this interview with Nils on the Ableton Live blog.
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twitter.com/paperkettle
illucia dtr is a patchbay controller for connecting computer programs.
Life Sequencer is a game in the illucia suite – it uses falling blocks to build step sequencer patterns (it is also remixable by Conway’s Game of Life). Also, it doesn’t actually make any sound – it just makes data using OSC. You can then take that data and send it to any computer programs… like Ableton Live or Max.
Behind the scenes (not shown in the video), Ableton and Max have some audio samplers running.
As I play Life Sequencer, it builds step sequencer patterns. I then patch the data from the step sequencer into the music samplers (so that the sample playhead moves around based on the block patterns in the game). I use cables to select and layer samples, and then I speed up the playback and audio pitch with illucia’s knobs. Eventually I patch in some sample rate reduction (and a special glitchy mode on Life Sequencer) right as I trigger the Conway’s Game of Life pattern remixer. The Conway algorithm eats through most of the existing blocks, and then I start placing more blocks to build a new pattern.
The illucia patchbay then becomes a physical controller for exploring these strange connections & reconsidering the inner lives of computer programs.
]]>Parade is an interactive art installation designed by Dpt. and Laurent Craste for the Chromatic festival in Montreal.
The installation consists in an imposing wooden cube. A lamp attached to the top of the structure dimly lights a livid and stripped scene where two porcelain vases lie on a white dresser. The lighting highlights their shadows on the wall. As soon as someone pushes the lightbulb, the shadows of the vases come to life and animate, as if by magic, to the rhythm of the swinging light source.
Ceramist by trade, Laurent Craste is an internationally renown visual artist. Dpt is a creative digital agency specializing in the design and production of immersive experiences.
Music: Ljoss by Forest Swords.
]]>DURR is a simple, colorful little watch, from Skrekkøgle, that shivers every 5 minutes. Why, you ask? Well, it’s to further investigate the subjective nature of time. By shivering every 5 minutes, the wearer can clearly feel how 5 minutes of waiting can feel extremely different than 5 minutes of watching TV. Handmade in Oslo, there are only 50 watches so far, and it comes in a variety of colors including Asphalt, Banana Yellow, Fjord Blue, Cooked Salmon, and Frosty Green.
Interactive speaker and lamp by Richard Clarkson.
Music is Brother by Matt Corby.
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