Mumbai’s chaotic sights and sounds // B.L.O.T.
Check out the ultra talented Audio Visual duo, B.L.O.T. from Delhi featured on the Guardian today. The Indian music collective explore the streets of Mumbai, recording footage and audio at the Market of Thieves, tabla workshops, vast outdoor laundries and on breakneck taxi journeys to create a unique audiovisual piece. Their adventure takes them to [...]
Punched-Hole Tunes: Ritornell’s Musicbox Business Cards, as Delicate and Magical as the Music
Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object.
Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity for Ritornell and a physical manifestation of how they play their music. They’re not just a physical gimmick, though: audiences get to participate with music making in the production of live, performative loops. (Sadly, no site for Katharina – you just have to get hold of one of her designs!)
Description of the project:
Ritornell’s business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.
Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.
More information on the project:
Ritornell for Musicbox
Punched cards of this kind of a profound relationship to generative music and computer music. For its part, the very genesis of the computer comes from punched cards: the punched cards in early mechanical looms used for textiles would inspire Charles Babbage. It’s possible that Max Mathews’ first digital audio, and other computer music that employed punched cards, would not have done so without the precedent of the textile industry.
And, of course, the music box and player piano also owe their genesis to punched cards, and thus the pre-digital mechanical reproduction of music. In an era before MIDI, composer Conlon Nancarrow made his own piano rolls, punched to his custom specifications, to play parts that would otherwise be impossible – before complex, glitchy, tracker-made electronic music. (Kyle Gann has a great piece on Nancarrow.) Those piano rolls have echoes in the interactive work of digital artist Toshio Iwai, and in the mechanical, push-button simplicity of the falling tracks of gems in music games from developers like Harmonix. By adding hand-cranked audience participation, though, Ritornell brings the mechanism into the realm of jazz.
And speaking of jazz influence, it’s well worth looking at the rest of the music of Ritornell.
Ritornell, the duo. Photo by Mirjam Unger, courtesy Ritornell.
As glowing ambient worlds cross paths with cooly-casual jazz, Ritornell’s music is to me endlessly evocative. Jazz gesture and good humor merge with waves of richly-imagined sonic textures. It’s music that’s both cinematic and improvisatory, dreamlike but well worth repeated listens. (I find it quite hard not to put it on loop, with warm swells of timbre against percussive rhythms, it fits perfectly with the deep mustard and gold hues of the last wave of autumn leaves in November.)
With the slightly-distant allure of Vienna-based vocalist Mimu added to the mix, the music is a kind of ambient pop reverie.
Don’t miss the music videos, shot seemingly through a thick, warm mist. And check out the rest of the music on the site. I hope we hear more from these folks.
Listening:
Golden Solitude, an eclectic, jazz-inflected sonic journey of an LP
Richard Eigner also did drums on “German Haircut” for Flying Lotus’ epic Cosmogramma
Versatile vocalist Mimu, right, as Richard looks on. Photo: Nina Divitschek.
Punched-Hole Tunes: Ritornell’s Musicbox Business Cards, as Delicate and Magical as the Music
Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object.
Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity for Ritornell and a physical manifestation of how they play their music. They’re not just a physical gimmick, though: audiences get to participate with music making in the production of live, performative loops. (Sadly, no site for Katharina – you just have to get hold of one of her designs!)
Description of the project:
Ritornell’s business cards are inspired by the project’s live show. The improvised concerts evoke a lively atmosphere by the combination of filigree electronics with playful timbres of diverse acoustic instruments and utensils such as egg whisks, toilet brushes, chopsticks or sewing needles. As an integral part of their set list, Ritornell invites the audience to bring along their private musicboxes. Arranged in a big circle, the players’ speed of turning levers is conducted: the results are as shimmering as you would expect.
Katharina Hölzl designed very special business cards to recreate this playful sonic universe. With the aid of laser assisted milling, nine micro compositions consisting of circles, triangles and Ritornell’s contact information were applied onto a long musicbox paper stripe. Before handing out the cards to interested adressees, each individual subdivision is played back via an especially designed musical box – thus providing every business card receiver with a tailor made musical experience.
More information on the project:
Ritornell for Musicbox
Punched cards of this kind of a profound relationship to generative music and computer music. For its part, the very genesis of the computer comes from punched cards: the punched cards in early mechanical looms used for textiles would inspire Charles Babbage. It’s possible that Max Mathews’ first digital audio, and other computer music that employed punched cards, would not have done so without the precedent of the textile industry.
And, of course, the music box and player piano also owe their genesis to punched cards, and thus the pre-digital mechanical reproduction of music. In an era before MIDI, composer Conlon Nancarrow made his own piano rolls, punched to his custom specifications, to play parts that would otherwise be impossible – before complex, glitchy, tracker-made electronic music. (Kyle Gann has a great piece on Nancarrow.) Those piano rolls have echoes in the interactive work of digital artist Toshio Iwai, and in the mechanical, push-button simplicity of the falling tracks of gems in music games from developers like Harmonix. By adding hand-cranked audience participation, though, Ritornell brings the mechanism into the realm of jazz.
And speaking of jazz influence, it’s well worth looking at the rest of the music of Ritornell.
Ritornell, the duo. Photo by Mirjam Unger, courtesy Ritornell.
As glowing ambient worlds cross paths with cooly-casual jazz, Ritornell’s music is to me endlessly evocative. Jazz gesture and good humor merge with waves of richly-imagined sonic textures. It’s music that’s both cinematic and improvisatory, dreamlike but well worth repeated listens. (I find it quite hard not to put it on loop, with warm swells of timbre against percussive rhythms, it fits perfectly with the deep mustard and gold hues of the last wave of autumn leaves in November.)
With the slightly-distant allure of Vienna-based vocalist Mimu added to the mix, the music is a kind of ambient pop reverie.
Don’t miss the music videos, shot seemingly through a thick, warm mist. And check out the rest of the music on the site. I hope we hear more from these folks.
Listening:
Golden Solitude, an eclectic, jazz-inflected sonic journey of an LP
Richard Eigner also did drums on “German Haircut” for Flying Lotus’ epic Cosmogramma
Versatile vocalist Mimu, right, as Richard looks on. Photo: Nina Divitschek.
A New Plug-in Format, Really? Avid Answers Our Questions About AAX and Pro Tools
Alongside its Pro Tools 10 and HDX unveiling, Avid turned some heads by recently announcing it was replacing its RTAS and TDM formats to a new format called AAX, “Avid Audio eXtension.” Now, your first reaction may not be unbridled enthusiasm, exactly: it seems the last thing users are likely saying is, “yes, please, I’d like a new plug-in format to worry about.” But I wanted to give the engineers at Avid a chance to tell us what they were thinking and why they made the move.
Avid’s product announcements have unfortunately coincided, presumably because of the financial calendar, with unpleasant restructuring and downsizing news, a topic NYC-based audio engineering site SonicScoop takes up. However, I prefer to focus here on the engineering side of what’s happening; we can look at Avid’s business and the changing business landscape another day. (For what it’s worth, I’m not as bleak as SonicScoop about the industry at large – least of all because I think the larger audio market remains healthy, even if Avid has been caught adapting to a new marketplace.)
The picture painted by Avid is one of a smooth transition to AAX. Now, of course, you’d expect them to say that, but I think they do have some specific technical reasons that, even with the change of name, the shift should be friendly to Avid developers. I’ll let them explain, though.
Bobby Lombardi, Senior Pro Tools Product Manager goes into the technical details of what AAX, and what it means for Pro Tools developers and users.
CDM: The main draw appears to be the ability to switch between native and DSP-based processing more easily, correct? From the end user perspective, can you get into specifics on what a user will see and how this will differ from RTAS/TDM?
Bobby: Visually, a user will see that the RTAS/TDM pop-up on the Pro Tools 10 Plug-in header has changed to Native/DSP. The exciting part is what they will hear. In the past, with HD Accel systems using a 24-bit fixed point processing environment, and host-based systems using 32-bit floating point processing, the gain staging could be quite different and produce significantly different results. With the introduction of AAX, sessions that migrate between host-based and DSP-accelerated HDX Pro Tools systems will sound identical.
How much work will it be for developers to migrate from RTAS/TDM to AAX?
Moving from an existing RTAS plug-in to AAX Native is relatively simple. Plus, once a developer has an AAX Native plug-in running, it will take a small amount of development effort to support AAX DSP. In comparison to TDM 56k used with the legacy HD hardware, AAX DSP is much easier to support and developers do not require specialized skills in writing 56k assembly code, so it opens up the opportunity for many developers to create DSP accelerated versions of their plug-ins.
We’ll still see parallel, separate versions of plug-ins for AAX Native and AAX DSP, correct? And some will, as with RTAS, presumably be native-only?
This is really up to the individual developer. Some developers may find it strategic to support one or the other, however Avid’s goal with this new format was to simplify plug-in development and reduce the complexity to support accelerated hardware.
RTAS and TDM are listed as “legacy” formats. Is Avid making any commitment to how long they’ll last?
The RTAS and TDM formats will continue to be supported in the 32-bit versions of Pro Tools but will not be supported once Pro Tools is released as a 64-bit application. The new AAX plug-in format is the bridge to 64-bit plug-ins for the Pro Tools and Media Composer platform.
Avid has expressed a desire to embrace open formats, but why is there still no common, industry-wide plug-in format? (Actually, there may be no good answer to that question, but I feel obligated to ask!)
We absolutely do embrace open platforms because they can open workflows that enhance the user experience. Part of the experience we need to ensure is that it’s stable, integrates well on our control surfaces, and provides a long-term commitment to the customer. For these reasons it’s important that we can design the plug-in architecture. For example, without designing AAX we could never give customers a plug-in environment that supports both DSP accelerated and native Pro Tools systems and ensure they delivered 100% sound parity. We hope that by providing a modernized AAX SDK for plug-in development, developers will find it easier not only to support Avid’s products, but also finding it easier to develop for non-Avid plug-in formats.
Any word on when we’ll see third-party plugs with AAX support?
More developers are coming online each week with their AAX offerings. We had over 25 developers showing over 60 individual AAX plug-ins at the AES tradeshow in NYC last month, and expect to see many more at the upcoming NAMM tradeshow. With the ability to provide all Avid third party developers a optimized development path to DSP-accelerated plug-ins, we do expect to see more DSP-accelerated plug-ins on the new AAX platform than the legacy TDM platform.
Thanks, Bobby. And for one other take, I happened to get to talk to Universal Audio about their transition. UA, given that they have their own DSP platform and support Avid’s rival packages, certainly aren’t dependent in their business on the Avid ecosystem (though you can be sure it makes a big part of their market). Anyway, here’s what they say; I’m guessing other third parties would say something similar, but if you’re a third party reading and wish to comment, please do so, and don’t let the fact that I only have UA here dissuade you.
Lev Perrey, Universal Audio Director of Product Development, responds to CDM:
Universal Audio intends to support AAX Native in conjunction with UAD-2 DSP accelerators exactly like we have just completed with RTAS support in UAD Powered Plug-ins v6. There is no announcement as of yet as to when the transition to AAX will be complete but we are actively developing and committed to the Pro Tools platform. Pro Tools 10 does support RTAS and initial testing with UAD plug-ins shows it to work just like Pro Tools 9.
As for the significance question, for UA moving to AAX Native should be similar to our recent migration to RTAS although it will be easier for us now moving to AAX since we have fully invested in direct Pro Tools development and better understand the Avid SDK.
We’ll continue to follow this story. Thanks to Avid for getting us more details; I know it’s appreciated.
More info:
AAX Audio Plug-ins @ Avid
Omar Souleyman’s wedding tapes from Syria
Ain’t no party like an Omar Souleyman Party because an Omar Souleyman Party don’t stop.
Cult Syrian musician Omar Souleyman is something of a star in the Middle East thanks to the fascinating melodies and wild grooves he’s been laying down in both Arabic and Kurdish since 1994. As reported earlier on Electronic Beats, this year he has already put his hands on a Björk remix and toured the summer-festival season pretty heavily.
Frank Ocean’s ‘Back’
The Odd Future singer releases his most accessible single yet.
With his beautiful voice and obvious pop appeal, Frank Ocean has always been the odd man out in the Odd Future crew. The 24-year old singer has just released his latest single 'Back', and it's probably his poppiest and most accessible cut yet. No word regarding what (if any) release this is going to be on yet, but stream it below and download it here.
KORG monotron DUO, monotron DELAY Bring Fun Back, via Mono/Poly, MS Circuits and Pocket Size
Every so often, something comes along that’s just irresistibly lovable. So it was with the Korg monotron. With a price of US$60 (or far less), a pocketable size, the ability to run on batteries, a nice, glowing red LFO knob, a delicious filter, and toy-like playability, everyone loves the monotron. People who have racks of vintage synths love the monotron. People who have never seen a synth before love the monotron.
Then, along came the Korg Monotribe, which grafted ultra-simplified analog drum circuitry and a sequencer, and … somehow, you wanted to love the thing instead of just loving it. I talked to a number of people who struggled to find something to say about the Monotribe – it didn’t have that magical effect the monotron did. Readers didn’t like thd drum sounds. The unit was bigger and pricier, but still lacked real control voltage or MIDI without hacking. Some of these units found very happy homes, to be sure, some mods were impressive, and it was great to see the circuit designs, which are quite clever, released. (Look closely at that design, and I think you begin to appreciate what was beautiful about the Monotribe that a lot of people missed: the circuits for the drums, while some folks maligned them, are incredibly elegant and simple.) But the bottom line: the Monotribe simply wasn’t the sensation the monotron was.
Well, Korg has wisely returned to the cute, impossible-not-to-buy, pocket-sized monotron package with two new models. And suddenly, that feeling — that “yeah, I have to have that” feeling, rather than the “I think I might want it” — is back.
The monotron DUO looks like it’s just a monotron with a new paint job, but it’s not. In addition to bumping from one VCO to a far more interesting two, the X-MOD circuitry comes straight out of Korg’s ridiculously-brilliant Mono/Poly classic. (Edit: I should add that the X-MOD is not specifically what made the Mono/Poly great – but it is nice to see anything off the original. In this case, it’s essentially a pitched FM, as readers point out, and as you can see in the video.) And that turns to another lesson learned from the monotron: bring back great circuits (like the filter on the MS) into modern designs. Like tasting the Tootsie Roll candy you had as a kid, it remains every bit as sweet. It’s otherwise the same monotron VCO square wave synth (double doubling your enjoyment in the process), but the addition of X-Mod should be good fun, as was the LFO on the previous model. Update: it appears the DUO also has the key range switch present on the Monotribe – bonus!
Then there’s the monotron DELAY. The silkscreen looks like it escaped from a movie tie-in toy for The Last Starfighter. But what you get is both that brilliant analog filter (the MS-10/MS-20) and a new “Space Delay.” I’m guessing the delay is digital, as it offers “analog-style echoes,” but no matter. Korg may have just created something more useful than the original monotron, because now you have a simple delay unit and the filter and the Stylophone-style controls in one unit, with an audio input jack.
Yeah, the ongoing emphasis on the “analog muscle” in these is a little funny, but let’s be honest: you want these. 2011 just got its first obvious Christmas list entries. And some of us will be looking for a holiday we can make up just to get them sooner.
Hope to have a hands-on — and some sound samples of the delay, which we know only by its silkscreen YouTube demos from Korg JP right now — soon.
See also DE:BUG coverage [Deutsch] – hi, guys, see you tonight at your Berlin Music Days party!
Across Time and Space, Tracing the Evolution of Western Dance Music: Data Visualization
Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the work of London/Seattle/New York Web agency Distilled, pulling genre births from Bass Culture, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life,The All Music Guide to Electronica, and Wikipedia.
Having just edited a book entitled The Evolution of Electronic Dance Music, I find it extremely interesting to watch in this visualization the way in which European synth pop and Jamaican dub can become, at once, vessels for a lot of these other musical idioms, just in terms of their ability to carry musical ideas across geography.
What is peculiar: this is more a selection of a few threads than it is any kind of comprehensive history, and many of those threads in turn trace backwards from a few modern styles more than they do forwards over those 200 years. If you accept that, though, there’s still something interesting to watch. Even hand-picking a few genres shows some fascinating connections.
But before I say any more, I think any methodology here will raise questions, and I’m as interested in reader questions as I am commenting myself. Mark Johnstone of Distilled has offered to answer questions, so from the intricacies of how the data visualization and mapping work to thoughts on how one untangles this musical history, I’d love to start a conversation.
Specifics of the genres aside, I think it’s the geographical connections that are in many ways the most interesting – all the more so as we can inexpensively get on trains and planes, cross increasingly-open borders (with some admitted major caveats), and be somewhere altogether different – or do the same from the comfort of our chair. Appropriately, I now see Thomson are a travel/vacation agency.
Discuss.
How Music Travels – The Evolution of Western Dance Music [Thomson blog]
Interactive Music Map [Thomson]
Open Source Music Hardware: Got Gear? Fill Out Our Survey as We Look at the Landscape
If you do want to get religious about this, you may want to wear this around your neck: Open Source Hardware logo as jewelry! Photo (CC-BY-SA) MAKE’s Becky Stern.
We’ve followed open source hardware – and generally hardware that is more open to user customization and modification – on this site since the beginning. As I prepare for a talk on the MeeBlip at Berlin’s Create Art & Technology Conference, though, I think it’s time to do a proper survey of the hardware that’s out there.
The ability to modify music gear is something that’s important to a lot of people as musicians. It means the ability to learn how the technology we use works, and therefore to have a deeper musical and compositional understanding of it. And it can mean the ability to make music hardware more expressive of your sonic imagination and creative ideas. Finally, it adds an additional avenue through which you can share your understanding and use and modification of musical instruments with other people.
Explanation below, or just skip to the survey, or live event in Berlin.
A Spectrum of “Open” in Music Gear
Even proprietary hardware can become more “open” in the general sense. In the early days of synths, it was commonplace to include detailed specifications and even circuit diagrams. That arguably furthered the evolution of music gear, as knowledge was shared, and it certainly allowed more advanced users to better understand how that gear worked. We’ve seen a subtle return to those days, with examples like Korg’s Monotron and MonoTribe hardware, for which the company released schematics.
The viral, revolutionary spread of the monome design owes in part a community built around modification, access to critical schematics, and some open sourced software which the community took and modified. The monome, however, focuses on a fully open-source protocol and availability to schematics. Those schematics are not free for use in your own creations, which has sometimes caused friction as makers sell modified or homebrewed variants of the monome. On the other hand, many in the monome community value the handcrafted original hardware and don’t particularly want “clones” and the like, and have found the available information more than enough to fuel their musical needs.
Open Source Hardware goes further, by placing everything under a license that makes it free for use. This would include the software (either running on the device, on an attached computer, or both), the schematics of the design, and even visual elements of the design, as well as the documentation. Projects that give their users the most freedom to work with any modifications they make also allow for unfettered commercial use; that is, you don’t have to worry if you sell a few, or even many, if you run afoul of the project’s original creators. Without going into the debate for or against such an approach, if this kind of sharing is your goal, then it follows it will important for you to make that freedom explicit. This sort of explicit use is also what is described in the Open Source Hardware definition, which our MeeBlip project has adopted because we feel the project and definition fit one another.
Note that there’s a very real debate about whether the ideals of free software are applicable to open source hardware. There’s no debating it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison: copying hardware means physically manufacturing something. (I’m surprised to see, in German, the use of the term Freie Hardware, which has generally been avoided in English. See also the Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance, which goes beyond some of these specific – and possibly not-really-applicable – licenses.)
I’ll say this: I think adding in the issues of economics, materials, sustainability, local manufacture, labor, distribution, and international trade make this question more compelling for discussion. It’s messier than software, yes – but given that all software relies on hardware on which to run, dealing with these messy and often demanding questions means engaging more of the many dimensions in which technology interacts with economics.
Resources:
Open Source Hardware (OSHW) definition / principles
Business models for Open Hardware
Amusingly, the MeeBlip continues flying under the radar as an open source hardware project, but once we actually get our shipping picture in place over the next couple of weeks, maybe we can work on that.
Let’s See the Gear!
But first, we just need to find out what’s out there. And that’s where you come in. If you’ve got a project, or use a project, or just know about a project, let us know. If it’s your own project – especially if you feel we’ve ignored you in the past (trust me, you don’t want to see my inbox or brain) – now’s your chance to tell us about it.
Because it’s the narrowest and most sharply-defined category, I’m most interested in those projects that fit the Open Source Hardware definition – not for philosophical reasons so much as taxonomic ones. But other projects are welcome, too; I’d like to hear about them.
About that MeeBlip…
And we’ll have the first of a series of updates on the MeeBlip project later this week. (The new SE and micro projects, and updated firmware, as well as vastly-expanded documentation, are all due soon, held up only by international shipping, weather, and illness challenges I’ll describe later.)
In the meantime, fire away.
Or Talk in Person!
If you’re in Berlin, this weekend join some terrific discussions on creativity, technology, and DIY, including my talk on the MeeBlip, lots of talks on hardware design and prototyping (including for beginners), and projects like the fantastic libmonome. And if you see me, say hi! (My talk is Sunday morning.)
http://createartandtechnology.de/
Survey
Direct link to Google Docs survey (login not required)
Handheld GarageBand: Apple’s Mobile Music Maker on iPhone, iPod touch
Apple’s GarageBand music creation and amp simulation on iPad is now also on the company’s handhelds, with iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S) and iPod touch (3rd-generation and better) support. You only have to buy GarageBand once; the app runs on all those platforms, so if you had the iPad version and also own a compatible device, you can automagically add it.
The iPad is definitely the roomier device, so what can you do with the handheld?
- Touch Instruments (pictured here) let you quickly tap out musical ideas.
- Amp and stompbox models work. As I’ve said in the past, that makes the handhelds into usable practice amps or pocket-ready effects boxes.
- Lay down multiple tracks (recording external audio one at a time), and edit in a simplified GarageBand track editor.
- You can still exchange files – up to eight tracks of recorded or generated music – with GarageBand and Logic on your Mac. That makes this a usable pocket sketchpad.
In short, not only does your Mac have little to fear, the notion is that these handheld apps could actually give you added incentive to do production back on the desktop.
Also in this update are features that will be useful to the iPad version, too, but are clearly intended to make the palm-top edition more usable. “Smart Instruments” let you play along with chords – ideal if you can’t quite twist your fingers into strumming positions on your phone. And there’s a historical musical precedent for this, too: think autoharps and frets and capos, musical innovations intended to make playing an idea easier.
If you want a bit more sophistication, the instruments expand to provide features like glissando, Leslie simulation, tuners, and so on.
Our friend Jim Dalrymple of Apple-focused tech site The Loop spots other enhancements. If you discovered the previous version frustratingly didn’t let you change keys without transposing audio, or didn’t let you set 3/4 or 6/8 time signatures (“do I hear a waltz?”), those holes have been patched – useful in the iPad version, too. Also, you can export to AAC or uncompressed AIFF even without going via GarageBand or Logic, a helpful issue.
US$4.99 new, or free update for existing customers. (Fear not for starving programmers. It turns out that this “Apple” company also makes those “iPhone” and “Mac” things, too.)
But this is all feature talk. What’s impressive to me is the way Apple has boiled down the interface of GarageBand into a smaller space. What’s left is only what is strictly necessary – complete with some photo-realistic imagery, yes, true to Apple’s notion of polish and texture. It makes a stunningly clear and obvious interface design, and that to me is inspiring: not as something I hope other developers will copy, but the kind of clarity I hope they’ll find in their own voice. After all, GarageBand for iOS shares DNA with Logic, not just mobile apps, and therefore a far more complex heritage.
Playing the glass surface of your phone as a musical instrument is likely to be relatively limited – compare a tangible instrument, which feels fun to play. But as a sketchpad, and as a pocket reduction of other things, this has appeal.
Images courtesy Apple. (Check out high-resolution versions.)
