Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
The Unbearable Weightlessness Of Music
Of all the art forms only two are completely weightless (I think). Music and spoken word. Writing is pretty light, just the weight of the ink on the page. We go up from there, watercolors, oils, ceramics, all the way up to that heavyweight, sculpture. Even sunlight has weight, but the ephemeral vibrations of music... unless some physicist out there corrects me... are utterly without substance.
So one might say music and the human voice are the closest sources of expression to feelings like love, fear, empathy, hatred... all equally non substantive but all powerful when it comes to motivating those same feelings. The effect of music and the human voice have led humankind on a merry chase throughout history. Stirring our deepest passions and fears.
Musical instruments used to have weight, but software emulations are gravity free and even the iPad Pro I am holding is featherweight. Perhaps to disappear one day altogether in the cerebral convolutions themselves.
Maybe that is why music moves into our hearts and minds with such ease. And, of course, we can hum some of this stuff ourselves, recalling melodies and the associated experiences vividly thanks to the engrams music makes within us. Even the molecules of fragrance have weight, but a vibration?
Well, probably just one more specious musing from yours truly. Feel free to destroy!
Comments
Nowadays it mostly is indeed. In my youth music was almost inseparably tied to its physical carrier for me. An album referred to a piece of vinyl or a CD, a mix was usually some tape containing a home-made collage of tracks. I think the abstract/intangible nature of music must be much more pervasive in this era of digital streaming (and being able to pick-and-choose single tracks instead of buying into coherent albums).
I hadn't thought about the extinction of packaging @brambos. You are right about that. And I think I must add writing to the list as it's dissemination via download is weightless as well. However, if it is written down to begin with there is tangible weight, tho pretty subtle.
I think music might possibly be one of the oldest forms of expression/entertainment because of its low dependency on external resources to produce. Imagine you're living in the upper Paleolithic in a small hunter gatherer tribe. Find some sticks to bang together and sing.... Instant entertainment. But more importantly, a way to bond a community and reinforce belief systems that are beneficial to the survival of the community, and the culture.
Music and accompanying lyrics can be representational, and reinforcing of culture, cultural beliefs, cultural ethics, and religious ideology, etc...
Singing, chanting, and rhythmic patterns have the ability to effect brainwaves, influence group behaviors, and learning.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-power-of-music-mind-control-by-rhythmic-sound/?redirect=1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melodic_learning
Military's throughout history used music to communicate commands, coordinate movement, and instill moral.
Modern advertising uses music to associate products, and make them memorable.
But from the perspective of physics, I think one might have to consider the weight of the air, and the energy required to move air to produce sound waves.
Otherwise, I agree that music is light in the essence that it can be created with nothing more than voice. Many animals and insects also use body, voice and sound to express and communicate, and they don't need anything more than what they were born with to do it.
Maybe early people first learned to sing, and then used their tool making abilities to build basic instruments like drums and flutes, as an accompaniment for enhancing vocals and singing?
Quite so
And good post @horsetrainer...
@horsetrainer, vocalizing sounds of nature, inherently musical, probably came first and at the very beginning of spoken language as a particular birdsong, for example, or a lion's growl as a warning, or the susseration of a rushing stream to indicate water nearby.
There is a song I wish to sing
There is a song I wish to sing
Unwritten, it’s initial chord stands
suspended in the breath of all,
as Gabriel’s horn yet to resound.
In the air, it shimmers.
In the light, motes dance to its preternatural form.
It percolates in the humus of the earth,
but crumbles to white, before the order of its shape.
It is unresolved, though the chorus of its longing
fills every verse.
It’s root is long and deep,
with no mode to contain a note transubstantiated,
heavier than death, lighter than the word.
–– me
I think that the inherent intangibility of music is a large part of why it is the only true universal language. Animals respond to it. Plants respond to it. I often wonder how human music will be perceived by beings from outside our planet - is this music thing Earthbound or does it have the power to span the stars? Carl Sagan certainly thought so - he included music on the gold discs sent into space with the Voyager crafts...
@Davypoo you triggered my memories of Dr. Masaru Emoto and his experiments exposing words to water. Maybe you are already familiar. This work is totally legit and awe inspiring.
The universal language is vibration and even unspoken words give off vibrations, it seems.
Messages In Water - fantastic book. My wife and I picked up a copy ages ago. Amazing and powerful info - it's frankly shocking he few people know of his work.
Energy is never created nor destroyed - it merely changes forms. This we know as proveable science. The energy of vibration is another form of the energy of intention - simply a difference of kinetic vs potential energy.
Eric Satie pioneered phonometrography (measurement of sound) using the Metric System. Someone should make an App based upon his work. A complete understanding might require reading his work in the original French. We have all heard his music but many might not know of his pioneering applications of science to sound.
From http://www.musicalobservations.com/publications/satie_pdf.pdf
Satie wrote:
TL:DR? Pearls before wine. Or wine first. Or just skip the pearls. Do we have more wine?