The Strange Agency » Audio

Strange Solstice

lucas — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 02:30:46 +0000

In desperate love with our iPads, we left the iPhone apps languishing unmaintained. They don’t copy or paste, they don’t play well with others, they’re all still rocking 3G. Yet, they still tweak sounds quite strangely, and so gentle(ladies and)men, we will rebuild them!

This holiday season we’re cooking up a whole new series of strange toys for the iPhone, and when we launch in the months to come, the current crop will have to go. As of today, the free sample versions of our paid iPhone apps have been axed.

How can you get some strange samples, you ask? We’ve made the paid apps free!

Slice beat-juggling freakout is free!
Curtis Heavy granular glitchfest is free!
Sound Scope Space wave sculpting is free!
Spoke rhythm massage is free!

See you next year

Keep it rollin’

lucas — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:28:26 +0000

There’s a fresh new Donut update today. Version 1.1 adds file loading, audio Copy/Paste, and Dropbox support.

Since loading files was in such high demand, Donut will even load multiple files at the same time. Rather than mix them however, the files are interleaved for maximal glitch. You can even record while a file is being loaded, to interleave your live recording with the file.

See it in action here:

Happy Tweaking

lucas — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:45:29 +0000

All new versions of Curtis and CP 1919 have hit the app store. These include stability improvements for Curtis along with Dropbox support for CP 1919. Update away!

Circles within Circles

lucas — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:57:15 +0000

Donut is live on the App Store, and it’s a strange one. It is very easy to get the app in a silent or screaming state, so I thought I’d explain the Donut concept in detail. As mentioned in a previous post, the idea for Donut comes from an ancient IBM tape loop machine I came across by way of this most interesting gentleman.

So let’s begin with a linear recording.

We can take this recording and wrap it into a loop.

Nothing new here of course. So let’s make a stack of these loops.

Now, if I understand correctly, the IBM machine let you select loops from a loop stack like this. The idea isn’t all that different from a phrase looper you might use with your guitar rig. However, if we can automate this loop selection, things start to get interesting. If we start stepping through the loops at the rate of audio, let’s say 44,100 steps per seconds, we create effectively a two-dimensional loop. Thus, in a very specific sense, we’ve created two-dimensional time.

A way to visualize 2d looping is to take our loop stack, and wrap it itself into a loop, just as we did with our linear recording at the beginning.

And from this step, we get the donut!

Doing a bit of math, we see that if we take a 2d loop of a second at a typical sample rate of 44100 Hz, we end up with 44100*44100 samples. If a sample is 4 bytes (16 bits * 2 channels), our donut requires 44100*44100*4 bytes, which by my count gives us just over 7 gigs. That’s a lot of iPads! So, to cram one of these donuts into an iPad, we’ve made the loop of loops far, far smaller.

In sum, you can think of Donut as a 2d time surface, or you can think of it as a large (currently 64) collection of synchronized loops. You can step through these loops one-by-one as you might in a phrase looper, or you can run through them at audio rate creating some quite far out sounds.

You use Donut by recording sound into (or through) it, and playing the recorded sound back. You control the playback and recording heads with a 2d vector for each, determining the rate at which the head steps through the loop and loop of loops. The rates are indicated in BPM to give a point of reference, but the BPM of course assumes a certain time signature and bar count, so it’s not absolute but helpful as a guide.

There are still quite a lot of sample points in there and therefore the 2d surface can be very sparse. Imagine if we recorded on the Donut in one direction, but played back in a perpendicular direction. We would only hit one sample of the recording amidst a loop of silence. Thus, Donut can create extremely sparse soundscapes.

To make the soundscapes denser, Donut lets your record and play sound with multiple heads (or, using a synthesizer term, voices). These heads can be spread out across the loop surface in both dimensions, creating some awesome temporal effects.

See a video demo of Donut™ playing with an ocarina and with Thich Nhat Hanh.

We hope you find the app as fun and interesting as we do! We have some cool ideas for future tweaks, and we welcome yours.

Time to Make the Donut™

lucas — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:09:36 +0000

A new project we thought we’d share: Making time two-dimensional with Donut™ on the iPad. Inspired by these contraptions, we banged out this phrase looper with a twist. Donut™ lets you record and play loops in 2d. We’re ironing out the functionality and UI, but do check the video for the project so far. It’s most pleasantly strange!

Curtis is down with ACP

lucas — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 20:15:46 +0000

We’re traveling a lot this summer, so development is a trickle, but we do have quite a lot brewing. We’ve finally added Intua-style Audio Copy/Paste to Curtis. It’s the top-ranked feature request, so this update should please a lot of users! We also worked in a browser, allowing you to view the user manual right from within the app.

At the same time CP 1919 got some orientation tweaks. The upcoming release defaults to standard app behavior and flips the whole screen around when you rotate your iPad. If you prefer the old style, it’s available via application settings, as is a new reverse mode if your iPad case if different from mine. Cool!?

Both app updates will be ported to their respective other.

In other news, we’re steadily porting Slice to iPad as well as exploring some future possibilities, like neural network sequencing.

So that’s what that does!

lucas — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 16:56:57 +0000

Today the long-missing manual for Curtis for iPad has finally found its way to our site. Hopefully this clarifies any obscurities in the interface. We’ve long wondered about all those buttons and sliders.

More Free Spunk

lucas — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 17:56:39 +0000

This limited circle of pure sounds must be broken, and the infinite variety of “noise-sound” conquered. Russolo

The latest build of Spunk, our particle-based synthesizer, includes a slew of improvements and some nifty new particle control options. The point attractor has been augmented with a couple planar attractors, one of which can pulse at a variable frequency.

Included in the download is a TouchOsc template, so you can run Spunk fullscreen while controlling it with your iPad. Tune in at port 1666.

Terrible .2′s

lucas — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 15:36:43 +0000

Performance recording just got released with Curtis for iPad 2.2, and it’s queued up and awaiting approval with CP 1919 version 1.2 along with a slew of nifty additions and the odd bug fix. We’re eagerly awaiting the release, but in the meantime, here’s a preview:

Further Back and Faster

lucas — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 01:39:27 +0000

At last! CP 1919 1.1 is runnin’ smooth and on its way to an App Store near you.

The backstory: We held off updating our development iPad to iOS 4 while finishing the app to keep it compatible with the old OS, and after launch we found it ran like molasses on the latest iOS. Imagine the horror! A great deal of low-level optimization later: we have a far slicker CP 1919 for you, clipping along at the 30fps we’ve all grown to love. Same great taste, more responsive interface.

Per your demand, audio recording is next in the queue. Audio copy will follow. But what about MIDI? Are y’all clamoring for MIDI?

A huge thanks to the early-adopters; you keep this all possible!