ShapeSeq for the iPhone and iPod Touch produces four rudimentary noises, which makes it sort of like the ukulele of music apps — well, if there weren’t already a lot of ukulele apps.
Each noise in ShapeSeq is one of the basic waveforms: sine, square, triangle, saw. And each waveform is symbolized by a basic shape-color combination: a blue circle, a red pentagon, a green triangle, an orange square.
Placing or moving one of those symbols on the screen (ShapeSeq also works on the iPad), you can roughly determine a given shape’s pitch (along the vertical axis) and volume (along the horizontal). It will then repeat. The manner in which that selected pattern repeats is determined by two factors: the pace of the loop, and whether it’s a four-beat or eight-beat sequence. These options can be altered in realtime, which makes ShapeSeq as much a performance tool as a compositional one.
This all seems fairly straightforward, right? But play with ShapeSeq for even a short period of time, and the expansive variety of potential patterns becomes apparent. Says the app’s British developer, Paul Apfrod, “One thing I like about what emerges from the simple system I created is the blurring of boundaries between what would be considered a note or a single beat of a sound and of a rhythm or melody of several sounds.” From little things big things grow.
After & Before: Screenshots of the iOS app ShapeSeq (above) and the earlier, pre-iOS version, called Shape Sequencer, which involved PlayStation 2 controllers (below, in a still from video footage)
To trace the course of ShapeSeq’s own development, you have to go back to 2004, several years before the 2007 launch of the iPhone. ShapeSeq had an earlier life as an art-installation project, when it was called Shape Sequencer. It was built in Pd, or Pure Data, a visual programming language that has a shared lineage with Max/MSP, and it was played on Windows machines using PlayStation 2 controllers (the PlayStation 2 at this point would have been a half-decade old). It also allowed for multiple players in a kind of cyber-jam.
Since then, the application has made two significant evolutionary jumps: from open-source art-hack to the commercial world of the iTunes Store, and from site-specific installations to global distribution. The website creativeapplications.net, which tracks the intersection of interaction and artistry, listed it among the “15 Best and Must Have iPhone Apps of 2009.” As Apfrod puts it, his project has gone from “art installation” to “software instrument.”
ShapeSeq is one of a host of music apps that have helped feed a growing popular interest in playing with, manipulating, sound. Such sonic play is an inherent part of contemporary experimental electronic music — from so-called “handmade music” tools to the home-brew software patches developed by laptop musicians. What’s remarkable about the music app field is that everyday consumers are participating in what previously would have been an esoteric affair.
Apfrod, who was born in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, and currently lives south of London, studied interaction design, and says most of his programming skills are self-taught. A musician himself, his earliest music-making experience took place, foretelling his current activity, on the Amiga personal computer. Over the course of an interview about ShapeSeq, he talked about, among other things, the cultural and technological shifts between Shape Sequencer and ShapeSeq, how programming is like composing music (and vice versa), and the need for a “software art” subcategory in the iTunes app store.
Marc Weidenbaum: How did ShapeSeq originate?
Paul Apfrod: ShapeSeq for iPhone is the child of the earlier Shape Sequencer project, which was made in Pd — Pure Data — and allowed four players to jam using four PlayStation 2 controllers. Shape Sequencer came from an investigation into notions of “playing” in the sense of musical instruments and video games, trying to address the problems of immediacy, intuitiveness, and expressivity for electronic music performers and audiences. It became its own type of musical instrument, with simple geometric shapes on screen representing different sounds. As the players move the shapes around, shrink them and rotate them, so the sound of each shape is changed in pitch, volume, and timbre. Thus, the players have their movements magnified into a live video abstract representation of the sounds being created. This visual feedback is good for the practice of the player, and satisfying for the audience, as they can follow the usually obscured practices of the electronic music performer by watching the screen.
Continue reading “The ShapeSeq of Things to Come”
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