iPad Music Software: The Strange Agency has updated Curtis for iPad (App Store link) – a multi-touch granular synthesizer & sampler.

The update turns Curtis for iPad into a keyboard granular synthesizer:

Version 2.1 brings a traditional keyboard along with new XY pads for pitch and position LFO control. Still, this is no ordinary synthesizer, and the keyboard will not always work as you might expect. The keyboard note pressed determines the size of the grains used, so the sound will indeed have the cycle length of the given note, however depending on the pitch and the content of the source recording at the current point, the resulting tonality may vary greatly.

Here’s what’s new in Curtis for iPad 2.1:

• keyboard control for chromatic mode
• pitch and position LFO modulation
• much multi-touchier
• improved pitch slew behavior

Curtis For iPad

Curtis uses an unusual hybrid of wavetable and granular synthesis to create tones and timbres quite apart from the standard FM or subtractive synthesis fare.

Granular synthesis works by combining many tiny grains of sound from an existing recording, creating new sounds with the texture of the original, now with endless temporal possibilities. Play the sound forward, backward, or even at a single point. Unlike scratching a record, pitch doesn’t depend on how quickly you move through the recording.