Developer Julien Bayle has released a new generative music app for iOS, Digital Collision (App Store link), that creates sounds based on physics collisions algorithms.
Bayle says that Digital Collision “can produces real nice sound textures from the most clear to the weirdest granular.”
Features:
- The sound engine is a polyphonic tone generator.
- Touch the screen to create particles. Each particle lives its own life, making sounds while bumping walls or meeting the other particles. By clicking on Menu, you can control particles lives & sounds. Zen defines the quietness of particles.
- Autogeneration is a special mode where particles are generated automatically, sometimes. Birth defines the amount of automatically generated particles in Autogeneration mode.
- Delay Amount is the percentage of delay fx, Time is the length of the delay, Feedback is the percentage of output sent back inside the Delay, Symmetry is the most strange parameter involving stereo disorientation.
- Filter Freq control the center frequency of the global BandPass filter & High Notes is the Highest Note produced (MIDI notation)
- Noise produces a ‘unique & nebulous collision soundscape’. You can control the amount of nebulosity.
- The background of the application is time-sensitive. It can be black at night and light grey at day, “to express the living behavior of the machine”.
No mention is made of MIDI support and it might not make sense in the context of an app like this. We’d like to see audio and/or video demos for Digital Collision so it would be easier to understand what level of control users have over the actual sound.
If you’ve tried Digital Collision, leave a comment and let us know what you think of it!
DIgital Collision is $4.99 in the App Store.
Looks great, I’m a big fan of generative apps actually so this looks exciting!
You know, the thing that I love about apps like this is that they force me to think differently about the act of making music. This is just so outside of my compositional process that I really have to stop and think about how I would utilize a tool like this in my composition. Sometimes I try them in one song and then move on, but every so often, an app like this pushes me to new ideas and it become a standard part of my tool kit. I’ll have to give this one a try and see what happens . . .
I had that same thing Chip, until I broke through and realized that the generative stuff didn’t need to be the whole piece. It’s pretty cool if you can lock it to a key and then create a bubbling flowing bit to blend into a track. It’s also a pretty neat thing to use the audio from a generative app as a modulation source for another track in your mix. It’s a real fresh sound compared to rhythmic LFO modulation.