Startup Pagefall has introduced Autony, described as an ‘Unreliable Sequence Generator’ for iOS.
Autony is a musical sequence generator with a controllable level of unreliability. The app is inspired by the work of Brian Eno and devices like the Music Thing Turing Machine and Mutable Instruments Marbles. It creates sequences that you can allow to mutate and change as they play, to create ever changing, ‘musically interesting’ parts in your music.
Features:
- musical sequence generation
- “reliability” control allows the sequence to mutate and change
- clock division from 1/32 to 4 bars to allow for generative ambient
- built-in note quantizer with full MIDI control
- quantize to simple chords under MIDI control
Note: Autony generates a MIDI output suitable controlling hardware or software synths, so it requires an AU host like AUM or Cubasis.
Pricing and Availability
Autony is available now for US $3.99.
If you’ve used Autony, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!
Very cool.
Seems a bit unreliable but I like that it works in AU so I will have to buy.
Will it work with Live or LPX?
Nice that they show integration with Bram Bos’s Rozeta! The relationship to the AU MIDI plugin suite was on my mind instantly, upon hearing about Autony. There are similarities but significant differences, which make for a whole modular workflow. For instance, the mutation features in Bram’s Bassline plugin allow for a lot more control (independently affecting note order, accents, and slides). But there’s something to be said about the simplicity of a single knob for “reliability”, so as to tweak the randomness of a generated sequence in realtime.
In a similar vein, riffer is pretty cool. And Physicles. Even StepPolyArp also integrates somewhat similar ideas. At this point, there’s room for quite a bit of experimentation with “semi-generative musicking” on iOS.
What’s missing the most, in my humble opinion, is an iOS AU MIDI plugin to do the “Michael Brecker Effect” of rotating chords based on a monophonic input. Robby Kilgore originally created that note effect for Brecker’s wind controller setup around the Oberheim Xpander. And Kilgore’s still at it, as he recently released scripts/plugins doing the same trick for desktop DAWs. But the only app doing this effect on iOS is unreliable (in a negative sense) and only works with “Virtual MIDI”. This is a case where AUv3 plugins are pretty useful, as you can connect them all in a plugin host like AUM, AB3, or apeMatrix (not to mention (pseudo-)DAWs like BeatMaker 3 and Cubasis).
Otherwise, we might AU MIDI plugins working like InstaChord/-Scale (or AAS Strum and the like). But, to a wind controller player like me, rotating harmonies are much more interesting than yet another way to use a #*$@^% keyboard!