6 ms·

This is great, all of the modern iOS devices are powerful enough to run as soft synths...combined with a multitouch interface, there's no reason I can't have a

This is great, all of the modern iOS devices are powerful enough to run as soft synths...combined with a multitouch interface, there's no reason I can't have a bank of 303s and 808s such with knobs and sliders and stuff I can move about as well as on a real piece of hardware. If I setup a few iPads I can interface with all that stuff at the same time.

sudont 16y ago
Isn't midi somewhat hacked for theater to coordinate stage events? If so, interesting uses of soft controls to mix together banks of lights in realtime, in addition to ambient sounds and other stage controls could result.
- icegreentea 16y ago
  Yeah, most of them run off a version of MIDI. Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
  - sudont 16y ago
    Hopefully the controls would be something beyond NSSlider-s, and allow for chaining commands together into groups that automatically move together, creating effect banks that can dynamically be broken down and controlled. I doubt it'll take off beyond small, avant-garde stage shows, as most theater effects would be pre-run ahead of time. Might be a stupid idea, but I'm basing a guess on twitter:blogging :: monome :keyboard. See also the painful complexity here: http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-dmx.pdf http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-d...
    - icegreentea 16y ago
      Yes yes... I remember... masters, submasters, scenes, cues... I was the sound guy. My console was like a 3rd of the size with a quarter of the buttons. My manual was less than a 10th the size as the lighting one. But I got more cables hanging out the back. So it will matches up.
  - anigbrowl 16y ago
    I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. Sure, sliders are convenient. But there are accelerometers, image processors, DSP on the microphone input...and multitouch lets you do some thing that don't make sense with a mouse, like pinching to alter the ratio of two two-dimensional values at once (or more). The CPU in the phone or pad is fast enough to do some fun things with complex numbers or whatever and spit out the results via MIDI to a heavy duty DSP. That would be quite useful for simulating vocal tracts or physical modeling things like woodwind reeds or brass tonguing (the different sounds a trumpet player can make by how they put their lips/tongue to the trumpet mouthpiece). There is gear to do this sort of thing already, but most hardware has only multiple 1-dimensional controllers or a joystick, effectively requiring a whole new set of playing techniques. Smartphones make it easier to adapt the input device to the specifications of the player rather than the other way around.
    - sudont 16y ago
      That's pretty clever. I hadn't though about muxing sound and controls together through DSP. The quicktime layer in cocoa would probably make it fairly easy to use a video stream as data input. Another thing the iPad has over a computer is simultaneity of interface elements, i.e. two people working a dashboard, vs one on a computer.
    - elblanco 16y ago
      Exactly what I was thinking, I can't even count the number of times I've been working with a softsynth and wanted to just reach into my screen (or have a configurable multi-touch interface down on my desk) I could touch and work with. The mouse is entirely inadequate...and the number of soft synth interfaces seems to be near endless.
  - meatsock 16y ago
    > what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. or a picture of google earth that plays local sounds wherever you touch. you're not thinking of the big picture, the interface can be anything you can fit on the screen.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  Sort of. MIDI led to MIDI Show Control, which used the same hardware, but eventually that evolved into DMX which is now the industry standard. Same basic concept, but the hardware and firmware have drifted a good bit apart. 7-bit values are still the norm for MIDI, DMX uses 8 bit values and extra bits for flow control, and requires a correspondingly higher bandwidth, so it's not very backwards compatible by now - that is, you could easily write a translator to drive older equipment, but you'd have to make so many compromises that you'd be better off writing something from scratch on the simpler platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Show_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Show_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512
  - meatsock 16y ago
    they also use different connectors, midi uses DIN and DMX uses XLR. they look like they'll fit, but they won't. however you can get cheap USB convertors for either.
    - wazoox 16y ago
      Just for the record, there were some synths with XLR MIDI connectors in the beginning of the 80s, for instance the rare Octave Plateau Voyetra 8.

sudont 16y ago

Isn't midi somewhat hacked for theater to coordinate stage events? If so, interesting uses of soft controls to mix together banks of lights in realtime, in addition to ambient sounds and other stage controls could result.

icegreentea 16y ago
Yeah, most of them run off a version of MIDI. Though to be honest, I can't really imagine this resulting in anything more 'interesting' than what we have so far. The 'hard' controls used pretty optimized. Whatever clunkiness is there is kinda hard to get around, due to the sheer level of complexity involved. I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. What are the interfaces in real life? Sliders. Granted, an iPad might be able to do funner things than equipment of comparable price, but top of the line equipment (which have motors to move the sliders/knobs to the presets you saved!) is pretty much as flexible and powerful as it can be.
- sudont 16y ago
  Hopefully the controls would be something beyond NSSlider-s, and allow for chaining commands together into groups that automatically move together, creating effect banks that can dynamically be broken down and controlled. I doubt it'll take off beyond small, avant-garde stage shows, as most theater effects would be pre-run ahead of time. Might be a stupid idea, but I'm basing a guess on twitter:blogging :: monome :keyboard. See also the painful complexity here: http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-dmx.pdf http://www.innovateshowcontrols.com/support/downloads/midi-d...
  - icegreentea 16y ago
    Yes yes... I remember... masters, submasters, scenes, cues... I was the sound guy. My console was like a 3rd of the size with a quarter of the buttons. My manual was less than a 10th the size as the lighting one. But I got more cables hanging out the back. So it will matches up.
- anigbrowl 16y ago
  I mean, what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. Sure, sliders are convenient. But there are accelerometers, image processors, DSP on the microphone input...and multitouch lets you do some thing that don't make sense with a mouse, like pinching to alter the ratio of two two-dimensional values at once (or more). The CPU in the phone or pad is fast enough to do some fun things with complex numbers or whatever and spit out the results via MIDI to a heavy duty DSP. That would be quite useful for simulating vocal tracts or physical modeling things like woodwind reeds or brass tonguing (the different sounds a trumpet player can make by how they put their lips/tongue to the trumpet mouthpiece). There is gear to do this sort of thing already, but most hardware has only multiple 1-dimensional controllers or a joystick, effectively requiring a whole new set of playing techniques. Smartphones make it easier to adapt the input device to the specifications of the player rather than the other way around.
  - sudont 16y ago
    That's pretty clever. I hadn't though about muxing sound and controls together through DSP. The quicktime layer in cocoa would probably make it fairly easy to use a video stream as data input. Another thing the iPad has over a computer is simultaneity of interface elements, i.e. two people working a dashboard, vs one on a computer.
  - elblanco 16y ago
    Exactly what I was thinking, I can't even count the number of times I've been working with a softsynth and wanted to just reach into my screen (or have a configurable multi-touch interface down on my desk) I could touch and work with. The mouse is entirely inadequate...and the number of soft synth interfaces seems to be near endless.
- meatsock 16y ago
  > what's the interface on the iPad going to be? A bunch of sliders. or a picture of google earth that plays local sounds wherever you touch. you're not thinking of the big picture, the interface can be anything you can fit on the screen.
anigbrowl 16y ago
Sort of. MIDI led to MIDI Show Control, which used the same hardware, but eventually that evolved into DMX which is now the industry standard. Same basic concept, but the hardware and firmware have drifted a good bit apart. 7-bit values are still the norm for MIDI, DMX uses 8 bit values and extra bits for flow control, and requires a correspondingly higher bandwidth, so it's not very backwards compatible by now - that is, you could easily write a translator to drive older equipment, but you'd have to make so many compromises that you'd be better off writing something from scratch on the simpler platform. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Show_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Show_Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMX512
- meatsock 16y ago
  they also use different connectors, midi uses DIN and DMX uses XLR. they look like they'll fit, but they won't. however you can get cheap USB convertors for either.
  - wazoox 16y ago
    Just for the record, there were some synths with XLR MIDI connectors in the beginning of the 80s, for instance the rare Octave Plateau Voyetra 8.