Musically useful!

Every so often, I surf the internet looking for interesting music-related software. The things that I find vary from freeware with a wide range of qualities, through shareware which tends to be as good if not better than many more overtly commercial versions, to commercial software, where my rule of thumb is that the smaller and more dedicated the programming team is, the more worthwhile the software will be.

Some freeware is a by-product of academic research, and there are sometimes gems to be found here. It is all to easy to be put off by sparse documentation, or worse, documentation which points to a conference paper containing formal methods mathematics. But perseverance can reap huge dividends when you find something that is clever and useful, or maybe amazing and a stroke of genius.

One such marvel is ixiQuarks, which is 'hidden in plain view' here on the Apple.com download site. There's no need to feel guilty if you passed it by, by the way.

At this point I have to comment about an interesting use of words by the UK television channel called 'Channel 4', who responded to my query about why I could not view their TV programme online catch-up service on my Mac with a comment about them looking at ways of providing the service to 'non-Windows' computers - I had never, ever, thought of having a Mac or a Linux box as owning a 'non-Windows' computer! To try and balance this rather biased view of computing, I have to report that this software does not work on 'non-Macintosh' computers.


ixiQuarks is freeware from ixi audio, who describe themselves as: "an experimental project concerned with the creation of digital musical instruments and environments for generative music." This sounds rather like a music-oriented version of the very broadly-based 'arts and technology' collective that I'm a founder member of: the Curiosity Collective.

ixiQuarks, as the name suggests, contains a number of separate units of musical generation, processing, or utility. The first thing to do is to read the documentation, which means going to the bottom of the help file, and reading the section called 'Getting started: few studies'. This explains the importance of loading files into the 'BufferPool' utility, and provides help with setting up audio inputs and outputs. For me, it all went smoothly, and I was soon trying out the very neat user interface to the Karplus-strong algorithm generated sounds in the 'Quanoon' (presumably a clever play on words for the Latin phrase 'sine qua non' which means 'without which not' and which is interpreted as meaning 'an essential requirement', which is pretty accurate if you want a versatile plucked-sound controller.) instrument, and using 'SoundScratcher' to smear audio files using granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can provide a daunting array of controls, and so something that makes times-smearing simple and mouse controlled is exactly what I've been looking for - think of it as a bit like the Smudge brush in a bitmap paint program, but for audio.

But the highlight for me was rather played down in the documentation: 'ScaleSynth'. The user interface looks deceptively straight-forward: the screen fills with pale green rectangles. But moving the mouse around the grid and clicking (or holding the mouse button down) rapidly reveals the purpose as the rectangles go increasingly orange in hue: horizontal and vertical movements control pitch using a menu-controllable scale. It gives a marvelously simple and intuitive interface to controlling pitch, and I'm now wondering why more electronic music software does not use this type of front end. This is probably my best 'find' for this year, although Puremagnetik's Vector is a close second.

Deep waves

One of the hardest problems in designing something is deciding where the 'sweet spot' is - just enough facilities to provide lots of possibilities, but not too much because that wastes money. Some current Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) provide lots of dedicated plug-ins for a variety of synthesis techniques, whilst others go for more novel approaches.

Abelton Live is one of the latter, with only a few dedicated virtual synthesis plug-ins. But by combining the simple sampler playback (via the brilliantly named 'Simpler') with the built-in MIDI and audio effects processing, and the general purpose 'Rack' that lets you build up your own special-purpose 'super-plug-in', you can do some amazing things.

This was highlighted for me with two recent purchases. I bought 'Lumen' for my Apple iPhone 3G, and 'Vector' from Puremagnetik.com for my Ableton Live 7 rig. Lumen is a puzzle game where you solve the problem of passing a beam of correctly coloured light through a series of checkpoints, using just a single light source, some coloured filters, and some mirrors. Rather like the Honda 'Cog' advert, both are variations on what is known as a Heath Robinson machine in the UK, or a Rube Goldberg machine in the USA, and they go by other names elsewhere. The machines build complex operations from simple parts, although practicality is not always high on the agenda.

The 'Vector' instrument rack produces sounds reminiscent of one of my favourite pieces of hardware: a Korg Wavestation. The Wavestation uses two distinctly different but related types of synthesis technique: vector synthesis and wave-sequencing.

• Vector synthesis was first introduced in the Sequential (Circuits) Prophet VS, and enabled a dynamic mix of up to four separate ROM sample-playback sounds either using a joystick controller, or stored as a 2D controller timeline.
  
  
• Wave-sequencing takes ROM-playback of samples, and allows the samples to be cross-faded together in a time sequence. This provides sounds with varying timbre, or a rhythmic character.

The 'Vector' instrument rack does not use a dedicated synthesiser, instead it uses the Simpler sample replay instruments, and puts them into time-sequences by using a series of built-in 'Note Length' MIDI processors to produce the timed note triggers, and it uses the ability to map parameters deep inside an instrument rack to be controlled from a simple top-level set of controllers. Having spent many a happy hour creating wave sequences, I was intrigued to discover that the process is very similar in the original hardware and this modern virtual form.

In fact, the virtual form might even be faster for making sequences, and it has the added bonus that the wave sequencing is not fixed, and can be edited with all of the MIDI and audio processing, plus all the instrument rack features like zones, velocity switching etc., plus the samples are no longer locked in a Korg ROM!

Being able to make and edit a synthesis technique by bolting together simple processors and instruments is a wonderful thing! For me, it is more satifying than solving a puzzle like the thousands inside Lumen... but it takes rather more time, and so far, isn't as portable!

Synthesizer cycles

History repeats itself - but with variations. Long ago, the first analogue monosynth was constructed. Soon there were others, and then many others. Then the analogue polysynth arrived and soon there were lots of them too (and almost all of them were ever so slightly out of tune!). Then MIDI ushered in the digital age and with it came FM, and soon there were lots of digital synths, and many FM synths too. Some digital synthesizers acquired a sequencer and became workstations, and soon there were many of them, all the same but all slightly different. (and if they were out of tune, it was now deliberate!)

Then the sequencer swallowed the mixer, the effects unit, and even the synthesizer and the Digital Audio Workstation was born: 'DAW', as Homer Simpson seems to be always saying, although his pioneering work in electronic music has never featured in any of the episodes that I've seen. DAWs had little bits of flexibility called plug-ins, and soon, there were lots of them too, and they did lots of things, and one of them was synthesis...

The result of this 'history of synthesis in about 100 words' is that we have a hi-tech world where there are many software synthesizer plug-ins: some are recreations of classic noteworthy instruments, some are improved variations on ideas that didn't work very well in an analogue world, and some are relatively new and reasonably novel. Whenever there are many examples of something, things seem to conspire to remove them, and this seems to be happening now. Some manufacturers/programmers are now making 'players' that combine several synthesis techniques together so that instead of selling you several different synthesizers, they sell you just one player that can use any of the techniques, thus gaining flexibility AND locking you into their player for playing their sound sets.

History says that this approach will work for a while, but them someone will have the idea of making a player that has several synthesis techniques built in, and which can read the sound sets from several manufacturers. Someone may even produce a standard that formalizes this inter-working, and we jump back to a single player but lots of sound sets. And so on, saw-toothing our way from one to some to many and back to one, over and over again.

But whereas people tend not to learn the lessons of history, hi-tech seems to be different. One thing which has marked out all of the digital generations of synthesizers has been that the previous generations have been included, which is why, for example, virtual analogue is now used in many non-analogue purist applications, or why FM keeps coming back into fashion. So the future would seem to be one where the classic sounds will not fade away because the instruments that made them no longer exist, but instead, they will keep being re-incorporated into the latest technology. So here's my prediction:

"The equipment may falter, but the sounds will live on."

Remember me in 30 years time and see if this is still true.