A look at the distribution of the Top 100 iPhone/Touch apps. Music is in a respectable slot, above healthcare/fitness, finance, even social networking, though well below games, books, and utilities. Overall, this makes for a healthy outlook for mainstream adoption of interactive sound:
Original post at macrumors.com, found via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com.
There is so much iPad coverage right now, it’s hard to say where to start, yet it would be incongruous not to note the object on the weekend of its release. Some of the best music-related coverage has been from createdigitalmusic.com, which is informedly skeptical but can talk with enthusiasm about apps such as RjDj and with curiosity about the role of the increased screen real estate (more on that in a moment), and the-palm-sound.blogspot.com, which has been characteristically encyclopedic in its coverage of various music-related apps.
I’ve yet to hold an iPad, and will soon (not today, but once the crowds dissipate) make my way over to the Apple Store, or the nearer Best Buy, to check it out. (For the record, its strict DRM system and the absence of true multitasking, not to mention the fact than any 1st-gen Apple device is likely to be improved upon relatively quickly, should it prove to be successful in the marketplace, means I will likely not be an early adopter.) One thing I’m paying attention to in particular is how the expanded screen size is adapted to by developers. Here are two images of Sonorasaurus, one of the better DJing apps, originally made for the iPod Touch and iPhone (below) and now available on the iPad (above):
The relative size of the images doesn’t do justice to the amount of space available for developers to play with on the iPad, as compared with the iPhone/Touch. But sometimes more is too much. One thing that’s made the iPhone/Touch such an enticing tool and toy for users is the relatively high quality of the apps developed for it. The small size of the device combined with its excellent touchscreen quickly led to a mutually appreciated sense of design standards shared by numerous app developers — interfaces have, by and large, been elegant, uncluttered, intuitive.
With the larger space, there is now room for navigation aids, for multiple windows, and for divergent styles. The latter isn’t of concern — the more the merrier — but the elegance that is inherent in so many iPod apps may prove to be in shorter supply on the iPad, and what ramifications that might have for users will be interesting to gauge.
Sonorasaurus has started off conservatively, bumping up the size of the original app, which will be a welcome development for anyone who has tried to manipulate its tiny controllers. It also adds waveform visualization (which shows BPM as spikes in the audio), along the lines of the Touch DJ app.
More on Sonorasaurus at sonorasaurus.com.
The winner of the Northern Arts Prize for 2010 is Pavel Büchler, whose recordings of applause were the subject of an entry here back in October 2008 (disquiet.com). Büchler’s works in various media, and his “You Don’t Love Me” is “an installation that uses a reel to reel tape deck, a bottle of whisky and a loop of found audio tape” (northernartprize.org.uk, via aestheticamagazine.blogspot.com):
Following up on the Chris (Cabaret Voltaire) Watson South Pole entry earlier this week (disquiet.com), here’s streaming audio from below the Antarctic ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. (sic) … Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA, an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf”: awi.de/en/research.
A visual interface collecting numerous radio stations from around the world that stream their signals, from ABC Classic FM 93.9 on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific to Africa No.1 106.7 in Yaounde, Cameroon: bcdef.org/antenna (via appscout.com):
Forget the “Funky Drummer” sample and the “Amen break.” Check out the folk music that Béla Bartók used as compositional launching points: “The composer’s vast archive of Hungarian folk music has been digitized,” writes The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross, and a fair number of his phonographic recordings have been uploaded in MP3 format”: db.zti.hu (via newyorker.com).
Oddly old-fogyish comment from Geoff Dyer in his New York Times review (nytimes.com) of Don DeLillo‘s new novel, Point Omega: “This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix ‘conceptual.’” Which begs this question: “Rare”? The subject of his comment, and of DeLillo’s book, is “24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon, who has produced a vast body of work that employs similar approaches to retooling existing familiar film — an approach that is, while often humorous and sometimes revelatory in Gordon’s hands, a fairly common approach in video art, and needless to say an even more familiar approach in remix- and appropriation-friendly contemporary music (witness the 24-hour rendition by Leif Inge of Beethoven‘s 9th Symphony, aka “9 Beet Stretch”: park.nl).
Cory Arcangel, Sam Durant, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), and Pipilotti Rist are among the artists participating in this project of using the Frank Lloyd Wright‘s interior design of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to their own ends. The show Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum will allow them, and many others, to “imagine their dream interventions in the space for the exhibition.” Also part of the show is Hypermusic: Ascension, a March 11 rotunda collaboration by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie (guggenheim.org).
Documentary coming this summer on industrial-rock band Ministry, titled Fix: fixtheministrymovie.com. (It doesn’t appear to be listed in the IMDB.com database yet.)
An album of music made on the Monome, created to raise funds for Haiti (einpuls.bandcamp.com).
Review of Kenneth Kirschner‘s album Filaments & Voids, for which I wrote the liner notes, alongside Radu Malfatti‘s Wechseljahre einer Hyäne. The author suggests, quite rightly, that the “the importance of silence can easily be overstated here”: tokafi.com.
New blog from the prolific creator of Palm Sounds: mobilemusicmarketing.blogspot.com (via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com).
A lot of coverage coming out of New York on the Unsound festival, including this review of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio: “Their shared improvisation only hinted at the dance floor. It was sci-fi ambient music, with a background wash of pink noise like interstellar dust and puffy tones, pitched and unpitched, arising out of the static”: nytimes.com. (Previous Unsound overview: nytimes.com. More recent coverage of Andy Warhol footage set to music: nytimes.com.)
Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon reflects from a very personal perspective on his return to his native Miami for a concert of his work, as part of the New York Times’s blog (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com). … Another Bang on a Can associate, composer Peter Wise, has posted streaming audio for a project at MASS MoCA (muziboo.com, via blog.massmoca.org).
First podcast from the creators of RjDj: more.rjdj.me. … A petition that Apple allow audio-file sharing for music apps. I strongly support this initiative: petitionspot.com.
Art critic Joseph Masheck on an exhibit at Minus Space in Brooklyn (minusspace.com) of Josef Albers‘s album covers for the old Command Records label. The exhibit ran through the end of January: “Albers was doing a job, and took it seriously.” (brooklynrail.org, via tommoody.us). I’m not sure Masheck does justice to how well the geometry and implied motion of the Albers covers reflect the ecstatic stereoscopic experimentation (by lite-music star Enoch Light) contained on the records they adorn.
The Lifehacker.com website has been including background sounds as part of its ongoing attention to improving work productivity, including recent posts on whether its readers “use ambient sounds to concentrate” (lifehacker.com) and a Mac-only piece of software titled Ommwriter that combines a blank writing space and ambient noise (lifehacker.com).
The netlabel astorbell.com/remix has set a May 1, 2010, deadline for its open-source remix project.
I’ve finally got proper vimeo.com/disquiet and youtube.com/mwd1 channels going, with “favorited” recommendations popping up on a regular basis. Twitter, as always, is at twitter.com/disquiet. More social-network coordinates at disquiet.com/faq.
The top 10 most-read posts of January (out of 42 posts in all) were heavy with Downstream entries — that is, with legal freely downloadable recommended listening: (1) sound art made at an Indian call center (pictured at left) by Mathias Delplanque, (2) Lesley Flanigan‘s music for speakers and voice, (3) the sound of mangled cassette players (by David Kirby), (4) Tim Prebble‘s “What a Picture Sounds Like” project (in which a shared photographic image is used as inspiration for musicians), (5) old-school ambient music from Phillip Wilkerson, (6) guitar processed by RjDj (the great iPhone/Touch realtime reactive music app), and (7) Gil Sansón‘s abstractions built from samples of contemporary classical music.
Also making the top 10: (8) a news report that included information on why Brian Eno likely won’t be nominated for an Oscar this year (for his work on director Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones), the forthcoming new Autechre album, and Nortec Collective‘s symphonic aspirations; (9) a “Quote of the Week” by sound artist Andrea Polli describing where art and science do not overlap; and (10) thoughts on issues in “interface lag” (or iteration lag) in the ongoing development of casual music-making apps.
The most popular post of the last 60 days was an overview of the, in my opinion, 10 best iPhone/iPod Touch Music/Sound Apps of 2009.
The most popular post of the last 90 days was of field recordings made at a church in Rye, England.
The most popular post of the last year is a streaming playlist of guitar-based electronica.
The 10 most searched-for terms during the month of January were, in declining order of popularity, with some ties in there, “brian” (as in Brian Eno), “commercial,” “performances,” “eno” (yeah, the other half), “mention” (I have no idea what that’s about), “autechre” (whose new record, titled Oversteps, is pictured at left), “banks violette,” “broad,” “drone,” and the especially peculiar “info wedding.” (Right after those 10 came “basinksi,” as in William Basinski, “bush of ghosts,” as in the compilation Our Lives in the Bush of Ghosts and the Brian Eno / David Byrne album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and “cicada,” as in the insect that is often used as a point of comparison for electronic background noise.)
The debate following the announcement this past Wednesday, January 27, of the Apple iPad has been voluminous and pointed. Both sides — and there really are two sides, as in any religious war — have their arguments. On the one hand, the iPad is a lovely device with product benefits in areas that most portable-computer companies ignore, and that Apple certainly hasn’t fully delivered on in the past: battery life (10 hours, reportedly), nearly instant-on (along the lines of what we’ve come to expect from the iPod Touch and the iPhone), and weight (just 1.5 pounds; Apple’s Air, at three pounds, was heavier than numerous non-Apple machines, and came saddled with numerous hardware hedges, including a small hard drive and an un-replaceable battery).
On the other hand, Apple’s increasingly closed software environment casts a long and dark shadow into the future of personal computing. From our current vantage, that is a potential future in which developers need to submit their work to the equivalent of censors before being able to make it available to its public. And it’s a potential future in which among the decisions facing those very censors is (based, at least, on Apple’s track record thus far in its app store) whether a given developer is impinging on Apple’s turf.
One of the best posts I’ve read on this subject is over at Peter Kirn‘s createdigitalmusic.com; deeply incensed by Apple’s restrictive software philosophy, Kirn may have penned his strongest post yet as he dissected the device within hours of its introduction.
To be clear, Apple’s mobile OS is very developer-friendly, hence the nearly 150,000 apps currently in the Apple store. Which is why I was especially interested in what developers had to say about the iPad. What concerns me at the moment is something Chris Randall, an accomplished software developer (I am pretty much addicted to his company’s product Automaton), hinted at in one of his Twitter posts, at twitter.com/Chris_Randall, also on the day of the iPad unveiling:
DroneStation is going to be kicked up several notches, of course. Plenty of room now.
DroneStation is a simple drone-making app that Randall developed for Apple’s mobile OS. I use it regularly on my iPod Touch, and enjoy it. The “Plenty of room” he’s talking about is ambiguous — he may have meant screen space, but he may also have meant memory size. Either way, what we’re looking ahead to now is a situation in which some existing apps will be overhauled for the newly expanded touch canvas, and others will be developed from the ground up (or abandoned in favor of something entirely new). I’ve long been of the mind that at least two of the best music apps for the Apple mobile OS, the beat program JR Hexatone and the track-syncing Touch DJ, were designed with the inevitable tablet implementation in mind; both are too cramped on my iPod Touch to count as truly fully realized, or really as fully usable.
What will be interesting to see is in the near future is how Apple developers respond to the new dimensions of the iPad, and whether the tidiness of the iPhone/Touch dimensions will give way, in the relatively expansive iPad, to bloat.
More on the iPad at apple.com/ipad. More on Randall’s software development at analogindustries.com.