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.

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

OtherDesertCities by Audio Damage, Inc. - Released

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Comments

  • sharifkerbagesharifkerbage

    @dvi said:
    I’ve been doing some research on Pierre Schaeffer and reading his massive Treatise on Musical Objects from 1966. He is such an acute listener and understood so many things about the possibilities of recorded sound. I think most people didn’t understand what he was after because of how it was employed in the school of concrete and acousmatic music (Henry, Bayle, Parmegiani, etc.)

    There’s a passage in the Treatise where he describes the components of his studio and describes a machine called the Zeitregler, Tempophone, or “Time Regulator” that allows changing the pitch of a recording without changing its speed or change the duration without changing its pitch (timestretching). This is Schaeffer’s description of the machine (Treatise on Musical Objects, p. 337-38):

    “The pitch and duration of a sound recorded on magnetic tape are proportional to the speed and duration of playback, respectively, which are, of course, in inverse proportion to each other when an ordinary tape recorder is used. If we change the speed at which the tape passes across the playback head, we will, in effect, have what we have called a “total transposition” of the sound under experiment, which becomes lower the slower (and therefore the longer) the playback and, inversely, higher the faster (i.e., the shorter) the playback.

    “The device thought up by Springer for his Zeitregler, and that forms the basis of the “universal phonogène” constructed and used by the Groupe de recherches musicales, enables the speed of playback to be separated from the time of playback—that is, the pitch of the sound from its duration. This is how it is done: four playback heads are placed around a small cylinder which turns one way or the other at an adjustable speed on a tape recorder, where the speed at which the tape passes through is also adjustable. The tape adheres to the “playback head” cylinder at an angle of 90 degrees; there is therefore always one head out of four, and one head only, in contact with the tape. The device works in three principal ways:

    “(a) As an ordinary tape recorder: the heads are motionless, one of them is working, and the tape passes through at standard speed;

    “(b) To transpose the pitch of a sound only: the speed at which the tape passes through remains standard; thus, the duration of playback is unchanged. But the playback head cylinder is rotated. If this is in the opposite direction from the direction the tape is passing through, the playback is, in effect, at a greater than normal speed (thus, the sound is transposed up); however, the four heads coming one after the other into contact with the tape has the effect that each one replays a part of what the previous one has already played: through these partial repetitions of the sound it is possible to make a sound played back at greater than normal speed last for a normal length of time.

    “A similar compensatory mechanism comes into play when the playback head cylinder is turned in the same direction as the tape, which reduces the actual speed of playback: in effect, only noncontiguous fragments of tape are played back, and it is by juxtaposing pieces that are only part of the sound that we can manage to make a sound played back at less than normal speed “keep” to its normal duration.

    “(c) To vary the duration only: the speed at which the tape passes through, and therefore the duration of playback, is changed. Then we rotate the playback head cylinder in such a way that the relative speed at which the tape passes through in relation to the playback heads equals the standard speed—hence the pitch is unchanged. The compensatory mechanisms that here enable us to lengthen or shorten a sound without the pitch being transposed are the same as those described above.

    “In practice, with a device like this we can obtain the following results: as pitch shifter, several octaves lower, and about a fifth higher; as duration shifter, we can change the normal duration of a sound by (plus or minus) 25 percent. Of course, these results depend on the sound being experimented on (held sound, word, music, etc.).

    “It is clearly possible to carry out the full range of adjustments between pitch shifter and duration variator and thus obtain modifications of pitch and duration at the same time, which leaves the experimental musician a great deal of freedom of innovation . . . but is occasionally likely to bring some confusion into his manipulations!”

    So, as I was reading this I realized that the “Mirage” algorithm in Other Desert Cities follows exactly this principle!

    So I looked at the manual to see if they referenced the Zeitregel, but to my surprise they refer to another machine from the same time, called the Eltro Information Rate Changer from 1967 (Schaeffer’s book was written in 1966 so he had the machine before that).

    And instead of Schaeffer, they mention the fabulous Wendy Carlos and a post from her website where she describes the Eltro, and she drops another gem: this is the machine they used to record the famous scene at the end of Space Odyssey where HAL breaks down singing “Daisy Daisy”! (There was a post on the Make Noise Instagram account where they reproduced this using their Morphagene, which is a device also inspired by Schaeffer). Perhaps it can be reproduced using Mirage as well.

    I never cease to be amazed at the fact that we can carry so many of these technologies with us every day. A HAL 9000 supercomputer has nothing our iPads today…

    Wow! this is really interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

  • dvidvi

    @Gavinski said:
    This is very interesting, thank you! I am currently reading the book Audio Culture, which is one of the set texts for the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening classes (which sound fascinating but have a several year waiting list) and is a collection of essays and extracts by various thinkers including Schaeffer. Probably something you have read already, if not, i highly recommend it.

    https://books.google.ru/books/about/Audio_Culture.html?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&redir_esc=y

    Glad you like it! The Audio Culture volume is essential. I’ve had it for a long time and I always find it handy. It would be great to have a similar volume that included more recent stuff or recent approaches.

    I would love to know what else is in the reading list for that course! It’s unclear to me from your comment if you are taking the course or just found it referenced somewhere? In both cases I’d appreciate if you could share it!

  • GavinskiGavinski

    @dvi said:

    @Gavinski said:
    This is very interesting, thank you! I am currently reading the book Audio Culture, which is one of the set texts for the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening classes (which sound fascinating but have a several year waiting list) and is a collection of essays and extracts by various thinkers including Schaeffer. Probably something you have read already, if not, i highly recommend it.

    https://books.google.ru/books/about/Audio_Culture.html?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&redir_esc=y

    Glad you like it! The Audio Culture volume is essential. I’ve had it for a long time and I always find it handy. It would be great to have a similar volume that included more recent stuff or recent approaches.

    I would love to know what else is in the reading list for that course! It’s unclear to me from your comment if you are taking the course or just found it referenced somewhere? In both cases I’d appreciate if you could share it!

    I would love to take the teaching course, the price seems reasonable and I'm very interested in the intersection of meditation / therapy / music / silence / interaction. Especially using music that is more sophisticated than the typical new age stuff 😂 . Unfortunately, as mentioned, there is a long waiting list, but i may well apply. I saw some reference to the Audio Culture book as a course text in Pauline Oliveros' book called Deep Listening which I haven't read yet but am intending to when I get round to it! If you haven't read that, it seems to be a good place to start and has extensive references to other works.

  • mistercharliemistercharlie

    This is so great I bought the desktop version for my Mac.

    I’m trying to keep my M1 Mac Rosetta-free, so I was disappointed to see that the ODC installer is Intel-only. However, I found that if you just manually copy the AU/VST files to the correct location, they work just fine. No Rosetta required.

  • NeuMNeuM

    @mistercharlie said:
    This is so great I bought the desktop version for my Mac.

    I’m trying to keep my M1 Mac Rosetta-free, so I was disappointed to see that the ODC installer is Intel-only. However, I found that if you just manually copy the AU/VST files to the correct location, they work just fine. No Rosetta required.

    I like it a lot, just waiting for a sale on the desktop version.

  • dvidvi

    @Gavinski said:

    @dvi said:

    @Gavinski said:
    This is very interesting, thank you! I am currently reading the book Audio Culture, which is one of the set texts for the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening classes (which sound fascinating but have a several year waiting list) and is a collection of essays and extracts by various thinkers including Schaeffer. Probably something you have read already, if not, i highly recommend it.

    https://books.google.ru/books/about/Audio_Culture.html?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&redir_esc=y

    Glad you like it! The Audio Culture volume is essential. I’ve had it for a long time and I always find it handy. It would be great to have a similar volume that included more recent stuff or recent approaches.

    I would love to know what else is in the reading list for that course! It’s unclear to me from your comment if you are taking the course or just found it referenced somewhere? In both cases I’d appreciate if you could share it!

    I would love to take the teaching course, the price seems reasonable and I'm very interested in the intersection of meditation / therapy / music / silence / interaction. Especially using music that is more sophisticated than the typical new age stuff 😂 . Unfortunately, as mentioned, there is a long waiting list, but i may well apply. I saw some reference to the Audio Culture book as a course text in Pauline Oliveros' book called Deep Listening which I haven't read yet but am intending to when I get round to it! If you haven't read that, it seems to be a good place to start and has extensive references to other works.

    On this topic, do you know this app? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aumi/id647002265?ign-mpt=uo=4

    It's called AUMI for Adaptative Use Musical Instruments, developed by the Deep Learning Institute founded by Pauline Oliveros. I haven't tried it, but for what I understand it's not aimed at musicians (and less iOS musicians) but at people with cognitive and physical challenges; it uses the camera to trigger sounds and/or as a MIDI controller which might make it more appealing for people in this forum.

  • dvidvi

    @dvi said:

    @Gavinski said:

    @dvi said:

    @Gavinski said:
    This is very interesting, thank you! I am currently reading the book Audio Culture, which is one of the set texts for the Pauline Oliveros Deep Listening classes (which sound fascinating but have a several year waiting list) and is a collection of essays and extracts by various thinkers including Schaeffer. Probably something you have read already, if not, i highly recommend it.

    https://books.google.ru/books/about/Audio_Culture.html?id=FgDgCOSHPysC&redir_esc=y

    Glad you like it! The Audio Culture volume is essential. I’ve had it for a long time and I always find it handy. It would be great to have a similar volume that included more recent stuff or recent approaches.

    I would love to know what else is in the reading list for that course! It’s unclear to me from your comment if you are taking the course or just found it referenced somewhere? In both cases I’d appreciate if you could share it!

    I would love to take the teaching course, the price seems reasonable and I'm very interested in the intersection of meditation / therapy / music / silence / interaction. Especially using music that is more sophisticated than the typical new age stuff 😂 . Unfortunately, as mentioned, there is a long waiting list, but i may well apply. I saw some reference to the Audio Culture book as a course text in Pauline Oliveros' book called Deep Listening which I haven't read yet but am intending to when I get round to it! If you haven't read that, it seems to be a good place to start and has extensive references to other works.

    On this topic, do you know this app? https://apps.apple.com/us/app/aumi/id647002265?ign-mpt=uo=4

    It's called AUMI for Adaptative Use Musical Instruments, developed by the Deep Learning Institute founded by Pauline Oliveros. I haven't tried it, but for what I understand it's not aimed at musicians (and less iOS musicians) but at people with cognitive and physical challenges; it uses the camera to trigger sounds and/or as a MIDI controller which might make it more appealing for people in this forum.

    I couldn't find any discussion of the app in the forum. Here's a recent interview with the person who coded it working with a broad group of musicians that initially included Pauline Oliveros.

    https://soundbytesmag.net/music-for-tablets-interview-with-henry-lowengard-app-developer/

  • Philandering_BastardPhilandering_Bastard

    @dvi said:

    @dvi said:

    @Gavinski said:.

    I couldn't find any discussion of the app in the forum. Here's a recent interview with the person who coded it working with a broad group of musicians that initially included Pauline Oliveros.

    https://soundbytesmag.net/music-for-tablets-interview-with-henry-lowengard-app-developer/

    Thanks for that. This is the guy behind Droneo.

  • Philandering_BastardPhilandering_Bastard

    @dvi said:
    I’ve been doing some research on Pierre Schaeffer and reading his massive Treatise on Musical Objects from 1966. He is such an acute listener and understood so many things about the possibilities of recorded sound. I think most people didn’t understand what he was after because of how it was employed in the school of concrete and acousmatic music (Henry, Bayle, Parmegiani, etc.)

    There’s a passage in the Treatise where he describes the components of his studio and describes a machine called the Zeitregler, Tempophone, or “Time Regulator” that allows changing the pitch of a recording without changing its speed or change the duration without changing its pitch (timestretching). This is Schaeffer’s description of the machine (Treatise on Musical Objects, p. 337-38):

    “The pitch and duration of a sound recorded on magnetic tape are proportional to the speed and duration of playback, respectively, which are, of course, in inverse proportion to each other when an ordinary tape recorder is used. If we change the speed at which the tape passes across the playback head, we will, in effect, have what we have called a “total transposition” of the sound under experiment, which becomes lower the slower (and therefore the longer) the playback and, inversely, higher the faster (i.e., the shorter) the playback.

    “The device thought up by Springer for his Zeitregler, and that forms the basis of the “universal phonogène” constructed and used by the Groupe de recherches musicales, enables the speed of playback to be separated from the time of playback—that is, the pitch of the sound from its duration. This is how it is done: four playback heads are placed around a small cylinder which turns one way or the other at an adjustable speed on a tape recorder, where the speed at which the tape passes through is also adjustable. The tape adheres to the “playback head” cylinder at an angle of 90 degrees; there is therefore always one head out of four, and one head only, in contact with the tape. The device works in three principal ways:

    “(a) As an ordinary tape recorder: the heads are motionless, one of them is working, and the tape passes through at standard speed;

    “(b) To transpose the pitch of a sound only: the speed at which the tape passes through remains standard; thus, the duration of playback is unchanged. But the playback head cylinder is rotated. If this is in the opposite direction from the direction the tape is passing through, the playback is, in effect, at a greater than normal speed (thus, the sound is transposed up); however, the four heads coming one after the other into contact with the tape has the effect that each one replays a part of what the previous one has already played: through these partial repetitions of the sound it is possible to make a sound played back at greater than normal speed last for a normal length of time.

    “A similar compensatory mechanism comes into play when the playback head cylinder is turned in the same direction as the tape, which reduces the actual speed of playback: in effect, only noncontiguous fragments of tape are played back, and it is by juxtaposing pieces that are only part of the sound that we can manage to make a sound played back at less than normal speed “keep” to its normal duration.

    “(c) To vary the duration only: the speed at which the tape passes through, and therefore the duration of playback, is changed. Then we rotate the playback head cylinder in such a way that the relative speed at which the tape passes through in relation to the playback heads equals the standard speed—hence the pitch is unchanged. The compensatory mechanisms that here enable us to lengthen or shorten a sound without the pitch being transposed are the same as those described above.

    “In practice, with a device like this we can obtain the following results: as pitch shifter, several octaves lower, and about a fifth higher; as duration shifter, we can change the normal duration of a sound by (plus or minus) 25 percent. Of course, these results depend on the sound being experimented on (held sound, word, music, etc.).

    “It is clearly possible to carry out the full range of adjustments between pitch shifter and duration variator and thus obtain modifications of pitch and duration at the same time, which leaves the experimental musician a great deal of freedom of innovation . . . but is occasionally likely to bring some confusion into his manipulations!”

    So, as I was reading this I realized that the “Mirage” algorithm in Other Desert Cities follows exactly this principle!

    So I looked at the manual to see if they referenced the Zeitregel, but to my surprise they refer to another machine from the same time, called the Eltro Information Rate Changer from 1967 (Schaeffer’s book was written in 1966 so he had the machine before that).

    And instead of Schaeffer, they mention the fabulous Wendy Carlos and a post from her website where she describes the Eltro, and she drops another gem: this is the machine they used to record the famous scene at the end of Space Odyssey where HAL breaks down singing “Daisy Daisy”! (There was a post on the Make Noise Instagram account where they reproduced this using their Morphagene, which is a device also inspired by Schaeffer). Perhaps it can be reproduced using Mirage as well.

    I never cease to be amazed at the fact that we can carry so many of these technologies with us every day. A HAL 9000 supercomputer has nothing our iPads today…

    Fantastic write-up. Just as an addendum: Eltro was simply the brand name the US distributor gave the Zeitregler. The device itself goes back to 1938 and was developed by AEG. During WW2 it was used by the German army to slow down intercepted transmissions for deciphering.
    After the war this version of the device wound up in Stockhausen’s studio although it is unclear whether he ever used it in a composition. Herbert Eimert did, at any rate. So did the Beach Boys:

    https://www.auditive-medienkulturen.de/2018/11/16/das-tempophon-zur-medienkulturgeschichte-eines-akustischen-zeitreglers/

  • dvidvi

    @Philandering_Bastard said:

    Eltro was simply the brand name the US distributor gave the Zeitregler. The device itself goes back to 1938 and was developed by AEG. During WW2 it was used by the German army to slow down intercepted transmissions for deciphering.

    After the war this version of the device wound up in Stockhausen’s studio although it is unclear whether he ever used it in a composition. Herbert Eimert did, at any rate.

    Ooh that makes sense! Thanks for this! I wonder then if there’s any relation between the one in Cologne and the one that Schaeffer got (which would be quite ironic, as they were famously “arch enemies”).

  • Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredrWrlds2ndBstGeoshredr

    Are there any good downloadable presets for this app?

  • Philandering_BastardPhilandering_Bastard

    @dvi said:

    @Philandering_Bastard said:

    Ooh that makes sense! Thanks for this! I wonder then if there’s any relation between the one in Cologne and the one that Schaeffer got (which would be quite ironic, as they were famously “arch enemies”).

    Could be. This made me laugh:

    “ When Stockhausen worked in Paris in one of the early electronic music studios, he proposed a study made up of tiny permutations of a single sound. "Don't do that," the studio director, Pierre Schaeffer, advised. "You'll only hear background noise." Stockhausen persevered, and eventually played the result to Schaeffer. "All you heard was 'shuuutt'," Schaeffer remembered. "He was terribly pleased with it."

  • NeuMNeuM

    @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr said:
    Are there any good downloadable presets for this app?

    None that I'm aware of. The presets it comes with are pretty good.

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