Noise

Noise Toys – Summery

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There was once something akin to Droplets on early iPads but I can find no trace of it now.

You add taps across the top and bars (tuned by their length) beneath. The flow of drips from the taps can be adjusted by rotating the tap.

With an array of options from setting a scale to tweaking the built in synth or sending midi out to other instruments it is both useful and fun.

For endless tweaking Stacks may satisfy. Following on from Strokes it is a sequencer/looper/granulator thingy. Currently in an early release version with several features ‘coming soon’.

More noise you say then obviously SoundDust’s Hobbes is what you are looking for.

With which you can Ooof and Doof to your heart’s content – or just click all the dmoRan options…

But for some serious randomness the Eclore player provides pieces that play in Reaktor and can be remixed to provide countless variations.

Restoring sounds to the iPad via memory lane.

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I was confused as to why the iPad would play music and the sound on videos but fell silent while playing games. I eventually realised it was in Silent Mode. Swipe down from the top right corner to open the Control Centre and tap the Bell icon to toggle Silent Mode on and off.

Best of all – this also restored sound to the wonderful SoundForest app which had been silent for a while. Created by Justin Alexander it seems to have been abandoned but still functions on the latest devices.

Many (many!) years ago I wrote a little thing for the Amiga called Beat Sheets which triggered brief sound samples. It was part of a series I created for children called Kids Disk, which were distributed on floppy discs for free from Public Domain libraries via snail mail. It was written with AMOS, which was pretty fancy for the time, probably in 512 kilobytes of memory. I did add a hard drive to the Amiga at some point which added 20 megabytes of storage – which I described at the time as “like having a vast empty warehouse to store stuff”; for context the SoundForest video below is 155 megabytes.

Lo and behold (isn’t the Internet wonderful?) someone had a video of Beat Sheets in action which they seemed to be running in an Amiga emulator…

Beat Sheets on the Amiga 1993

Fast forward several decades and SoundForest is a far more sophisticated app, downloaded from the App Store and running on a hand held device with a terabyte of memory. It follows the same idea of tapping sound samples into a grid. You can extend your song by swiping to the left for a fresh sheet. Tapping the top bar stops and starts the player and double tapping changes the speed. Different sounds are available in the various environments – jungle, desert, ocean etc. Great fun.