Pure Data

Saturday Synth Porn: Sound of Life (SoL) is a very unusual audio-visual performance by noise performer 23N! that explores the idea of generating noise music from the movements of spermatozoa:

SoL consists in generating sounds and visual dynamically through the tracking of the movement of individual spermatozoa of the semen of the performer observed under a digital microscope. The obtaining of the semen is an intrinsic part of the performance.

Details on the work below. Read more…

Niklas Saers has released a free iPhone music app, pOSCa (App Store link), that turns your iPhone into a controller for audio and multimedia software.

If you’ve used pOSCa, leave a comment below and let us know what you think of it!

Description:

pOSCa is an Open Sound Control compliant controller for audio and multimedia software such as Ableton Live, Reaktor, Plogue Bidule, Traktor, Max/MSP/Jitter, Pure Data and OSCulator.

Using the controller from the iPhone allows the electronics music performer to get up from behind the laptop and interact with his audience. pOSCa sports a nice dial, up/down and left/right buttons and ten programmable buttons. Programming the buttons is easy: just select a button and set a value with the dial, then you can set another button to another value. When you hit the first button again, the dial will spin in place and give the desired value. This allows for easy pre-programming up to the performance and quick interactivity.

In order to have no surprises in concert, the settings are kept in the iPhone/iPod’s Settings area. Be sure to set the settings to interact with your audio software.

Here you can set your computers IP address and what UDP port your software is listening to. You can also set a name for the device so that you can have multiple devices controlling the same synth without causing confusion. Also you can set default min and max values. These are by default set to max and min for MIDI as many of the synth come from a MIDI heritage, but they can be set to anything you want.

pOSCa works best using WiFi and works equally well on the iPhone and iPod touch, although when using it in concert you might want to turn off the phone functionality first.

FantaStick (App Store link) is a minimalistic remote interface for the iPhone for use with software such as Max/MSP or Pure Data.

Features:

• Minimalistic, fullscreen control area with nothing on it but what you provide.
• Multitouch-events on the device are forwarded to your host via UDP. Information includes the touch state (begin, move, end) and coordinates.
• Designed for no-hassle: zero-click startup, the device does not sleep or suspend network connection, flicker- and lag-free.
• Displaying images (fetched with URLs) and caching them locally for use on non-networked locations.
• Basic drawing with lines, boxes and text.

Visit http://pinktwins.com/fantastick for quick start and usage examples.

NOTE: this app works together with other software. When launched you get a black screen, what happens then is up to you. Visit the website for examples and documentation.

TouchOSC, available now in the App Store, is an iPhone/iPod Touch application that lets you send and receive Open Sound Control messages over a Wi-Fi network using the UDP protocol.

This allows you to remote control and receive feedback from software and hardware that implements the OSC protocol such as Pure Data and Max/MSP.

The interface provides a number of different touch controls to send/receive messages:

• Faders
• Rotary controls
• Push buttons
• Toggle buttons
• XY pads
• Multi-faders
• Multi-toggles
• LEDs

The program comes with four layouts that are organized in multiple pages.