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 Store

Audiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.

Just finished the Mozaic manual -- here's what I'm going to start exploring with it now!

I knew it would only be a matter of time before I would enter this world ..

.. I picked up Mozaic recently to make use of a very useful script by @wim (and I still didn't do that testing that I said I would .. but since I've read the manual now, I will be able to do it better!). Now that I know how it works, it's time to do something interesting!

I have a messy/monolithic codebase in Haskell that I use as a music logic library to underpin a lot of the music composition/performance I do in 'live coding'. Last year, I also delved into a pretty deep analytical exploration of some ideas into expanding the concept of harmonising with pentatonic scales (a system that I semi-jokingly dubbed 'tripentaoctatonics') and bolted that onto the side of it. It also has a bit of homegrown deterministic machine learning built in and an academic paper about that -- examples and link available into the main repo. It should really all be split apart into modules and tidied up, but since it's been a creative venture I've just jumped into it with the pure enthusiasm to realise my ideas and it's grown into a semi-organic mass. Fortunately, Haskell's type system has helped keep it bug free enough to perform with it safely!

https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm

Anyway, the 'tripentaoctatonic' exploration was very interesting -- it used an algorithm based on the foundations in music logic module to generate then analyse millions of combinations of cells of pitchclasses and isolate some specifically rare musical events of interest to me. I finished it all and played about with generating music with the outputs a bit, but then other projects picked up and I didn't go too much further. You can hear a couple of generative examples of the sound here:

Sine waves:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b9a7zlao0t7athg/Sine Waves-trimmed.m4a?dl=0

Same but with algorithmic orchestration (a different concept I've been developing -- https://youtube.com/watch?v=JzGpUal_hY4 if interested!):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/b9a7zlao0t7athg/Sine Waves-trimmed.m4a?dl=0

Here are some relevant parts of the original codebase if anyone fancies a peek.

Music logic:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm/blob/liveCode/src/MusicData.hs

Generative analysis:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm/blob/liveCode/src/Analysis.hs

Loads of automated outputs:
https://github.com/OscarSouth/theHarmonicAlgorithm/tree/liveCode/output

Sooo anyway, with the backstory out of the way -- what'll I do with Mozaic?

With the computationally heavy analysis done in Haskell and exportable into formatting that can be copied and pasted into Mozaic scripts, I'm going to try and build some interfaces that let me work with MIDI input from controllers and/or sequencers to explore the melodic and harmonic 'colours' that the ideas I've been exploring can offer in a more 'realtime' manner -- something I could viably jam with.

I wouldn't say that anything particularly useful to anyone will be created in this process, but I'll share anything cool that I come up with. Hopefully be able to build a few instruments that let you explore with the concepts 'playfully' and without needing to understand the theory under. Just be able to find cool melodies and modulate around in newly conceptualised 'tonal areas' and stuff.

I might learn some stuff about Mozaic script too.

I'll also be performing a superhuman feat of mental endurance throughout, by not spamming @brambos with nonstep requests to add cryptic functional programming concepts from Haskell into Mozaic script! :D

I'll check back in to share some cool stuff in .. probably a really long time!

Various photos of the 'by hand' analysis that I did, before I moved the 'tripentaoctatonic' project from paper into code:


(lots of pages like this)





(I sketched out a harmonic structure for a symphonic piece that uses a bit of this theory -- I doubt I'll actually write the work but you never know!)




Comments

  • Do you have any ancestors who were/are mathematicians? (serious question)

  • @lukesleepwalker said:
    Do you have any ancestors who were/are mathematicians? (serious question)

    No idea!

  • Wow. This looks insane. Music is math.

  • If I was to risk a little philosophy off the cuff, I'd say that music feels to me like an abstraction of language in the same way that maths could be an abstraction of physics. Our ability to practice it by far extends beyond our ability to understand it, but what we do understand allows us to make magic happen and walk in a world of alchemy and intrigue.

  • @OscarSouth said:

    If I was to risk a little philosophy off the cuff, I'd say that music feels to me like an abstraction of language in the same way that maths could be an abstraction of physics. Our ability to practice it by far extends beyond our ability to understand it, but what we do understand allows us to make magic happen and walk in a world of alchemy and intrigue.

    It is looking more and more like language is a byproduct of our brain being wired for music. If you’ve never read it “This Is Your Brain on Music” is a fascinating book detailing studies that show that the brain has a lot of pre-wiring to handle things like beat detection, melody extraction, transposition, ability to reconstruct and recognize melodies from partial melodies — present in all infants and grown ups even with absolutely no musical knowledge and training. Given how critical music is for birds and how sophisticated the music-specific neural processing is, it seems like those capabilities made language possible, piggybacking on the music stuff. Old school neuro people see music as fluff riding on language, but I think evolutionary biologists are moving away from that view.

  • @espiegel123 said:

    @OscarSouth said:

    If I was to risk a little philosophy off the cuff, I'd say that music feels to me like an abstraction of language in the same way that maths could be an abstraction of physics. Our ability to practice it by far extends beyond our ability to understand it, but what we do understand allows us to make magic happen and walk in a world of alchemy and intrigue.

    It is looking more and more like language is a byproduct of our brain being wired for music. If you’ve never read it “This Is Your Brain on Music” is a fascinating book detailing studies that show that the brain has a lot of pre-wiring to handle things like beat detection, melody extraction, transposition, ability to reconstruct and recognize melodies from partial melodies — present in all infants and grown ups even with absolutely no musical knowledge and training. Given how critical music is for birds and how sophisticated the music-specific neural processing is, it seems like those capabilities made language possible, piggybacking on the music stuff. Old school neuro people see music as fluff riding on language, but I think evolutionary biologists are moving away from that view.

    Really interesting idea that it’s the other way around. I have that book but haven’t read it yet. I will read.

  • @espiegel123 said:

    @OscarSouth said:

    If I was to risk a little philosophy off the cuff, I'd say that music feels to me like an abstraction of language in the same way that maths could be an abstraction of physics. Our ability to practice it by far extends beyond our ability to understand it, but what we do understand allows us to make magic happen and walk in a world of alchemy and intrigue.

    It is looking more and more like language is a byproduct of our brain being wired for music. If you’ve never read it “This Is Your Brain on Music” is a fascinating book detailing studies that show that the brain has a lot of pre-wiring to handle things like beat detection, melody extraction, transposition, ability to reconstruct and recognize melodies from partial melodies — present in all infants and grown ups even with absolutely no musical knowledge and training. Given how critical music is for birds and how sophisticated the music-specific neural processing is, it seems like those capabilities made language possible, piggybacking on the music stuff. Old school neuro people see music as fluff riding on language, but I think evolutionary biologists are moving away from that view.

    That is a fantastic book.
    Recommended

  • @JeffChasteen @OscarSouth : it really is a great book - apparently there is a follow up which i haven't read. A friend of mine went to med school with the author and said that he is one of the smartest people she has ever met (and interested in super diverse stuff).

  • Bookmarked!

  • I’m so confused but at the same time I know there is a lot of potential value (musical value) and hard work here. Mozaic is one of my favorite apps. Thanks for all your efforts.

  • This is going to be a fascinating project, keep us updated please @OscarSouth

Sign In or Register to comment.