Soup Granular alternatives?

Qmishery

I can't get it (I m on iOS 10 for a while), what are closest alternatives?
I have Borderlands and iDensity... anything else to check?

Crawlingwind

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/spacecraft-granular-synth/id1391256308?mt=8

Qmishery

Never heard of, thanks

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Crawlingwind

Some of us like that kind of thing...

@Max23 said:
most of the granular stuff is rubbish because it just results in a constant drone of some sort ...

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Crawlingwind

I knew you couldn't let that one go

@Max23 said:

@Crawlingwind said:
Some of us like that kind of thing...

@Max23 said:
most of the granular stuff is rubbish because it just results in a constant drone of some sort ...

i don't find that very musical, because it has no relation to the rest of the music that is supposed to happen ...
lets generate some random noise > mental masturbation

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Qmishery

should i get iPulsaret if i already have iDensity?

As for uniqueness of Strange Agency - yeah, i also have their other apps like Donut, CP1919 or Curtis on my older iDevices

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JeffChasteen

@Max23 said:

@Qmishery said:
should i get iPulsaret if i already have iDensity?

As for uniqueness of Strange Agency - yeah, i also have their other apps like Donut, CP1919 or Curtis on my older iDevices

yes.
ipulsaret is the big brother of idensity.
idensity for lets fool around a little, ipulsaret for serious work

This!

Qmishery

@Max23
What do you think of 1950s - 1960s -1970s electronica? Was it some random sound exploration for fun too or there was some theory behind? It's interesting question for me, i guess there supposed to be some "alternative music theory" for avant-garde / atonal/ noise music that we somehow lost in modern era of VST and apps solutions. Also in modular synth / idm communities i often see debates about "melody-based music vs. texture/timbre-based".

Some examples

ohwell

@Qmishery in more academic circles, granular synthesis “proper” is often thought to involve extremely short grains ( < 50 ms). (Under 50ms the source material is nearly unrecognizable. That’s the stuff associated with Xenakis’ analogique a-b and Barry Truax.) IMO iPulsaret might be the best app to explore that territory. (And it goes beyond that too, of course.) Most of what people use granulation for is closer to what I’d call microsampling - not sure what the academic term is for it (where the slices are long enough to clearly recognize the original sound, but short enough to remove/restructure most of the context.)

(My favorite example of the microsampling style granulation is Xenakis’ concrete PH () it’s an incredibly powerful and beautiful technique too; compare that to analogique a-b to see what I mean ()

ohwell

If you like Chowning you should get apesoft’s Stria too.. (IMO apesoft is really as good as it gets on iOS (and short of creating your own synths in csound/max/reaktor/etc) for these more academic techniques btw.)

Qmishery

@ohwell

i feel i should read this book one day... (if i remember right and it's related to your explanation)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/microsound

Thanks.

As for "recognizable cuts", reminds me this minimal techno artist:

you should get apesoft’s Stria too

Oh, i got that one too! I have most apesoft apps and some amazingnoises too (and as i said, older strange agency apps). i dont have that crosssynthesis app and ipulsaret, and what else.. need to check..

i really need to dive seriously in them! years pass by..

ohwell

Yes! Akufen was my own gateway drug for microsampling back in the days! As for the Roads book, check your pm.

Qmishery

Speaking of previous StrangeAgency apps, Donut was something very interesting, but hard to find use for.

From now-deleted description:

So let’s begin with a linear recording
We can take this recording and wrap it into a loop.
Nothing new here of course. So let’s make a stack of these loops.
Now, if I understand correctly, the IBM machine let you select loops from a loop stack like this. The idea isn’t all that different from a phrase looper you might use with your guitar rig. However, if we can automate this loop selection, things start to get interesting. If we start stepping through the loops at the rate of audio, let’s say 44,100 steps per seconds, we create effectively a two-dimensional loop. Thus, in a very specific sense, we’ve created two-dimensional time.
A way to visualize 2d looping is to take our loop stack, and wrap it itself into a loop, just as we did with our linear recording at the beginning.
And from this step, we get the donut!
Doing a bit of math, we see that if we take a 2d loop of a second at a typical sample rate of 44100 Hz, we end up with 4410044100 samples. If a sample is 4 bytes (16 bits * 2 channels), our donut requires 4410044100*4 bytes, which by my count gives us just over 7 gigs. That’s a lot of iPads! So, to cram one of these donuts into an iPad, we’ve made the loop of loops far, far smaller.

In sum, you can think of Donut as a 2d time surface, or you can think of it as a large (currently 64) collection of synchronized loops. You can step through these loops one-by-one as you might in a phrase looper, or you can run through them at audio rate creating some quite far out sounds.

So it's like ring of loops and you change vector of playback heads.

Crawlingwind

I was very fortunate to attend a Xenakis classroom lecture in 1982 at Mills College. It was very inspiring. He was also an architect, and he played us a recording of a piece while following the score and tracing the outline of a building that was built from the score. It was amazing!

@ohwell said:
@Qmishery in more academic circles, granular synthesis “proper” is often thought to involve extremely short grains ( < 50 ms). (Under 50ms the source material is nearly unrecognizable. That’s the stuff associated with Xenakis’ analogique a-b and Barry Truax.) IMO iPulsaret might be the best app to explore that territory. (And it goes beyond that too, of course.) Most of what people use granulation for is closer to what I’d call microsampling - not sure what the academic term is for it (where the slices are long enough to clearly recognize the original sound, but short enough to remove/restructure most of the context.)

(My favorite example of the microsampling style granulation is Xenakis’ concrete PH () it’s an incredibly powerful and beautiful technique too; compare that to analogique a-b to see what I mean ()

ohwell

@Crawlingwind Niiiiiice!!!!! Wow!

gkillmaster

@Qmishery said:
@Max23
What do you think of 1950s - 1960s -1970s electronica? Was it some random sound exploration for fun too or there was some theory behind? It's interesting question for me, i guess there supposed to be some "alternative music theory" for avant-garde / atonal/ noise music that we somehow lost in modern era of VST and apps solutions. Also in modular synth / idm communities i often see debates about "melody-based music vs. texture/timbre-based".

Some examples

Wow, thanks for posting. Really enjoying listening to these!!

ohwell

Hmm, since you’re on iOS 10, maybe this is interesting? MegaCurtis by The Strange Agency LLC. (Haven’t tried it..)m

Qmishery

Ah, i had iphone version of megacurtis, need to get ipad version (MegaCurtisBig) which is more up to date with functions

1nsomniak

I still have most of those Strange Agency apps on my 32bit "classic apps" device.
The best was Curtis (not Mega Curtis) it was a lot like SpaceCraft with wild animated graphics.

Just gave Donut another spin...yup still totally confusing and sounds like a 8 bit radio between stations at the best of times - cool graphics though. I think it may be more of a cool concept in theory only.

Crawlingwind

One of the first apps I bought was CP1919, and I really grew to dislike the sound. So easy to distort...

sysexual

@Max23 said:
I like drone things too but is this just noise, is this music, am I just wanking for my own amusement in front of a computer? ^^

no...yes...well yes i am.

Qmishery

@1nsomniak said:
I still have most of those Strange Agency apps on my 32bit "classic apps" device.
The best was Curtis (not Mega Curtis) it was a lot like SpaceCraft with wild animated graphics.

Just gave Donut another spin...yup still totally confusing and sounds like a 8 bit radio between stations at the best of times - cool graphics though. I think it may be more of a cool concept in theory only.

You saw explanation I quoted above btw? It had illustrations too, I need to re-up them (they deleted all old app pages dammit)

1nsomniak

@Qmishery said:

@1nsomniak said:
I still have most of those Strange Agency apps on my 32bit "classic apps" device.
The best was Curtis (not Mega Curtis) it was a lot like SpaceCraft with wild animated graphics.

Just gave Donut another spin...yup still totally confusing and sounds like a 8 bit radio between stations at the best of times - cool graphics though. I think it may be more of a cool concept in theory only.

You saw explanation I quoted above btw? It had illustrations too, I need to re-up them (they deleted all old app pages dammit)

Yes, the explanation prompted me to go give it another try.
There’s also instructions included in the app but the results are like clicks and static.
Not getting any of the lush sounds of other granular apps.

Qmishery

It's possible to get something more usable with it, but it's hard as it feels like controls are not precise at all

1nsomniak

Ok thanks for the videos, I’ll watch them in a minute.
I was playing with it and made some progress filling in the donut with more layers of sound and playing back very slowly.

Qmishery

Videos are not that much helpful (their tutorials on cp1919 were more to the point) but still

Good luck!

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