Pioneering synth designer Wolfgang Palm has announced that he’s bringing his PPG Phonem vocal synthesizer to the iPad.
Palm says that they have optimized the Phonem sound engine for the iPad and adapted it to make the best use of multi-touch control . It also offers Inter-App Audio and the ability to run as an Audio Unit Extension.
Here’s the official video intro:
Here’s a demo of three instances running at once:
Here’s what he has to say about Phonem:
PPG Phonem lets the user create expressive vocal synthesis beyond anything ever heard before. With its advanced routing system every aspect of the voice can be controlled and modulated in any conceivable way. Anything from a quiet whisper to a scream. Use the intuitive text to speech tool to make Phonem say whatever you want.
Although the PPG Phonem was originally designed to do just vocal synthesis, it turned out that the system was also capable of producing a wide range of universal synthsizer sounds. So we extended the parameter ranges and made everything accessible to the user, to take advantage of this fact.
The human voice is a very complex system, which can produce a wide range of sounds. It is however restricted by natural physical dimensions. Phonem does not impose limits, letting you create all the filter configurations and sweeps you could only ever have dreamed of.
Wolfgang Palm
Features:
- Create your own singing style and expressions
- Large Phoneme inventory – 46 english/american plus 5 german plus 4 french phonemes
- Versatile excitation generator/oscillator
- Working with typical voice source or wavetable and time-corrected-samples (TCS)
- Extreme time stretching, freezing and reversing
- Pitch track – let your robots sing
- Control track – let it cry and shout
- Song mode – making it easy to compose your synthesized text
- Wave page – create your own wavetables and modify time-corrected-samples
- Import WTS and TCS files from the iPad WaveGenerator and WaveMapper
- All internal parameters available to the user – give your voices a special dialect or individual character
- Versatile matrix system – allowing 19 sources to control 40 parameters
- Two X/Y control pads freely routable to 40 parameters
- 6 Envelopes, for control of filter sweeps, waveform, noise and many modulations
- 4 LFOs plus Vibrato, Flutter and Growl generators
- Fully programmable resonator filter – allowing production of new sound effects
- Delay/Reverb effect
- Overdrive/Distortion effect
- A/B compare your edited sounds
- AU extension – run multiple Phonem instances in AU hosts
- IAA – inter-app audio support
- Audiobus 2 with statesaving
- 10 min audio recording and Audio copy
- Redesigned browser with new listing filters
- Directly accessible context help for each module
- Freely configurable schematic keypad, with extremely expressive modulation options
- 4 Keypads play modes: Poly, Mono, Legato and Multitrigger.
- 4 MIDI modes: Poly, Mono, Legato and Voice-Per-Channel.
Pricing and Availability
Palm says that PPG Phonem will be available ‘soon’. Pricing is TBA.
Oh cool! Wolfgang Palm does brill stuff…..it’s great he is programming for Ipads AND PHONES …we dreamed of doing this years ago never being able to afford a REALPPG e.t.c – technology today is amazing!
Sounds boss. Love to see this sort of ‘digital and proud of it’ stuff on iPad instead of Y.A.V.A..
Great intro video too.
I don’t like seeing those cramped interfaces and watching the user in the demo struggling to get the touch interface to respond. That’s mostly what I hate about iPads, generally. Some developers do such a good job of working around that, and making apps that don’t cause that same degree of irritation.
As for the sounds, it is now getting to where these digital synths are all getting pretty wild results; however, it isn’t clear how artistically controllable they are. Subtractives are so popular because they are very logical and relatable. FM not so much, but not impossible. These other approaches are worthwhile for sure, but all of them require a user to really establish their relationship and workflow with the sound & process.
You need more ice cream in your diet.
I’m pretty sure I’m getting AT LEAST enough, but I so love the suggestion!!
Is it because I seem humorless? Or because I have trouble getting the iPad to respond to my touch that I just need more ice cream in my system?
iPad is more responsive with ice cream eaters. Some of my best iPad playing is done within 20 minutes of eating ice cream. An hour later the ipad becomes completely unresponsive to my touch.
I’ll add it to my shopping list and beginning extensive testing.
Didn’t notice the user in the video struggling, but I agree with your point, to an extent. Some apps behave better than others, but I’ll take them all over mousing around with software. Love my hardware even more, but it’s not all so portable, nor can I afford all the vintage hardware that apps provide affordable recreations of.
WTF !!
i know it’s kinda cheapskate, but i would be a lot more into these if there was cross grade pricing between desktop and tablet version.
i also think all the ppg ‘family’ could be interesting if workflow was designed around moving audio/data/sequences around one app to the next, sold as a bundle deal because they are all pretty cool. 🙂
price probably 19.99
all the other apps are
Yes Please,Wolfgang Palm stuff on I Pad is great.Regarding the comments on Interface, the iPad is getting there just look at IPAD Pro when the Metal graphics Software is used as on Moog System 15 .Personally I have got big hands ,it takes about 1 hour for the effects of Ice Cream to reach these extremities ,but only 1 second to hit the small brain I have.The intervening time is frustration.The IPAD is a great solution for many with sound tech lust,-£10 for a new synth every few months versus £500 -1.5K for Hardware, plus the Integration with other Apps.
Love phonem as a vst but Wolfgang really does design his interfaces for the touch screen… looking forward to getting my fingertips on it.
instead of making an analogue synth (how boring), uli behringer should have teamed up with wolfgang palm in order to relaunch the wave 2.3, w/a better bilt-in sequencer, on-board waveterm b plus the realizer). i´d purchase that thing in a nanosecond.
it is out for 19.99 (as that was a surprise)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/phonem/id1088853546?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4