iPads in Percussion Ensemble - PASIC 2014

I PA D S I N P E R C U S S I O N E N S E M B L EC H A R L E S M A R T I N

Hello everybody, welcome to my session, my name is Charles Martin and today I’m going to be presenting “iPads in Percussion Ensemble”. In this talk I’m going to tell you about how I have been using iPads in my percussion group, the musical apps I’ve developed for our performances, some new music that my colleagues and I have been writing, and also about how you can create iPad app-instruments, even if you’re not a programmer.

So in this session today, I’m going to talk about three things - - Firstly - Performing with iPad - what setup, what apps- Secondly - new music for percussion and iPad - Finally, (briefly) making your own musical apps and it’s possible to do this without programming.

C H A R L E S M A R T I N

P E R C U S S I O N C O M P U T E R M U S I C I N T E R A C T I O N

- me- 3 things: - percussion, - computer music, - interaction- doctoral student in Computer Science- Australian National University in Canberra.

- I’ve put together a percussion ensemble dedicated to performing with iPads and percussion, - I’ve created several iPads apps for us, we’ve performed of improvised iPad music- I’ve also started to compose some works for iPad ensemble or iPad.

In this session I’ve also got an ensemble: and I’m really pleased to invite Christina Hopgood and Maria Finkelmeier to the stage to perform all the music in this session.

To start this session off, we’re going to play an excerpt of one of my pieces called Gesture Study #1. This piece is for iPads alone and we’re performing on one of my apps that I’m introducing at PASIC2014 called “PhaseRings”.

G E S T U R E S T U D Y # 1C H A R L E S M A R T I N

Play excerpt Gesture Study #1 - 4 minutes.

- all using Phase rings, each player has different sound scheme.- move to musical app

M U S I C A L A P P S

So - since the iPhone/iPad came out we’ve had an explosion of apps for music making…- apps for reading scores- apps to replace gear like metronomes, tuners, amplifiers, effects - of course - apps that are musical instruments

This is what I’m most interested in - as a percussionist I like combining lots of instruments together and using iPads is a great way to bring computer musical instruments into a percussion setup.

I think that iPads actually fit really well with percussion- First of all, physically - iPads “fit” with percussion setups- they run on batteries - less complicated on stage than computers- you can perform on a touch screen percussively- Steve Schick said that percussion is “striking, scraping, brushing, rubbing, whacking” etc and you can do most of those things on an iPad!- simpler experience than on desktop applications. Percussionists are trained to make awesome music with a range of simple instruments!- Finally, iPads are built to be networked devices and this gives us some exciting opportunities for connecting an ensemble together and helping us perform.- talk about iPad apps…So I’m just going to show you a little bit about the iPads apps that I’ve designed and the kind of sounds that they can make.

Snow Music:

Snow Music is actually the first app I worked on and it lets you perform with the sounds of snow that I recorded while studying in Northern Sweden.

This app has three switches and each turns on a generative sound scape of cymbals, bells or snow so that you can create a continuous backdrop for improvisations.

MetaLonsdale

MetaLonsdale is an app that lets you play with field recordings from a café in Canberra, as well as some percussion sounds. MetaLonsdale a looping function controlled by a switch that loops your tapped notes and a switch that controls continuous café sounds. You can tap this “sounds” button to choose a new sound randomly. When you tap the button you also proceed through a sequence of harmonies.

In MetaLonsdale, all the iPads on the network will synchronise their harmony so that the ensemble has a coherent sound.

BirdsNest is an app that I developed for my percussion group Ensemble Evolution to use in an improvised performance - it’s similar to MetaLonsdale but it mostly uses bird sounds that I recorded in Sweden as well as some sounds like xylophone and woodblocks that we thought went well with the forest setting.

So as you explore different sounds in this app using the sounds button you actually go on a tour through this forest, right up to a treehouse view at the end and again all the iPads on the network move together on the tour.

Finally PhaseRings is a brand new app that I’ve been working on this year.

- This is for improvising with pitched sounds, - you get a setup of notes taken from a particular scale - you can tap a ring to trigger a short sound and swirl to continuously create that sound.

- seven sound schemes- four compositions- custom composition

I’m really excited to announce that PhaseRings is now available on the AppStore and it’s free so I would encourage you to go and check it out!

S C H E I M P F L U G P R I N C I P L EM A R I A F I N K E L M E I E R

And now we’re going to perform a work in progress from my talented colleague Maria Finkelmeier

- this piece uses PhaseRings along with instruments from Grover Pro Percussion and these wonderful keyboards from Yamaha.- This is Scheimpflug Principle.

S E T U P

- How to setup iPad with percussion

So just a bit about the technical setup for using iPads in concert.

For mounting iPads, there are lots of commercially available stands or mounts to attach iPads to microphone or cymbal stands and I’ve never found much use for them.

I think as percussionists, we have multifunctional traps tables or other ways to mount instruments and these are most flexible.

I do like to have cases for iPads that allow you to prop the iPad up in various ways - Maria actually had the idea of using the iPads upright so that the audience can see what is going on which is a great idea.

- some way of getting the sound out to speakers. - the headphone output on the iPad is very high quality and it’s just fine as an audio output.

- important to use a high quality audio cable from the headphone output to speakers,- particularly because you will be amplifying the signal and because the cable will have to be quite long to work on stage.

- I used to use long stereo headphone to dual-RCA cables. - I’ve ended up going for mono cables that take a stereo signal from a headphone output and either add the channels together or throw one away. - The cables I’m using today I actually put together myself from parts from an electronics store- in the handout a link to a HOSA cable which should be pretty good.

- DI box.- I have two very cheap Behringer DI’s here which have two channels each.- DIs are scarce at big events

It’s important to have good speakers to perform with computer musical instruments -

- one speaker per performer- We use these Mackie powered speakers - the SRM450 which is a super common speaker for smaller PA systems.- Of course at events like PASIC there’s a massive house PA system like this line array - we pan the signals

- network- connect apps together over a wireless network- I bring my own network access point which runs off USB power.

C O R R E S P O N D E N C E SC H A R L E S M A R T I N

- Correspondences. - the next piece we’ll be playing.- For iPads using BirdsNest and setups of small percussion instruments from Grover- Just a note about the notation:

- Chosen to use standard notation- articulation markings to represent touch gesture- pitch level represents “rough” pitch on the apps

C O N N E C T I O N S ! M I D I A N D N E T W O R K S

- connecting iPads to other devices and each other over a network

- midi enabled musical apps

- two ways to connect MIDI controllers to iOS devices.- “Lightning to USB Camera Adapter”- use USB midi devices- Korg nanoKey keyboard

- dedicated iOS MIDI interface - iRig MIDI made by IK multimedia,- This is the setup that I use when I perform on my malletKat

Network connections

- apps connect to each other to share information - selected sound, interactions with buttons, position in the composition- synchronise parts of the performance so that an improvisation becomes more cohesive

- apps connect to computer- computer can analyse touch information, recognise gestures and also analyse the state of the performance

- Metatone Classifier (desktop app)- recognises touch gestures- detects “new ideas” in performance and sends messages back to the iPads.- iPads update their interface in response - new sounds or harmonies.

S N O W M U S I C I M P R O V I S AT I O NC H A R L E S M A R T I N , C H R I S T I N A H O P G O O D , M A R I A F I N K E L M E I E R

- now we’re going to perform an improvised piece with the Snow Music app- this is the earliest way that I used these apps- In this piece we’ll use the app to perform with the snow samples as well as create background soundscapes for our improvisation.

H O W T O M A K E M U S I C A L A P P S

So I’m going to give you the 10-minute overview of how to make a musical app - this is definitely not a trivial thing to do if you’ve never done any computer music or programming before.

The good news is that it’s never been easier to get started with programming and computer music and there’s lots of resources to help you out, I’ve put some on the handout and on my blog.

S T E P 1 - U S E P U R E D ATA

So for making the musical part of the app - I would suggest using Pure Data otherwise known as Pd. This is a visual programming environment for creating computer music works.

So when you open Pd you get a totally blank canvas and unlike Ableton or Logic, etc, if you want something like an eq or an effect, you have to make it!

There’s two good reasons to use Pd:- there’s lots of resources to get started and it’s very widely taught- there’s a version of Pd called “libpd” that can be embedded into other software

S T E P 2 - E M B E D I N O B J E C T I V E - C O R S W I F T A P P

( T H I S I S T R I C K Y )

So I said that you can use libpd to open a pd file from another program. One way to do this is to make your own iOS app. This is not easy but it’s not crazy difficult either - there’s tons of books and online resources.

There’s two languages for making iOS apps - Objective-C and the new language called Swift. This is actually a screenshot of my BirdsNest app open in Xcode - just to prove to you that it’s real, I’ve put the red box around the Pd files that in my project over in the left hand column and I’ve got that arrow pointing to the line of code where I open up the main Pd file for BirdsNest - cool!

So working on this app - I’ll spend a lot of time in Pd, getting the sounds the way I want them and then go into Xcode to work on the user interface, the network features, etc.

M O B M U P L AT( N O P R O G R A M M I N G )

Now you might be thinking - oh I’m never going to learn to program - but there’s a way to use Pd on an iPad without making an app from scratch and that’s “MobMuPlat” this is a great app that opens up Pd files on your iPad as well as special files that define an interface.

You make the interface in an app called “MobMuPlat” editor - that’s what’s on the slide.

Then you email the interface and pd files to yourself or put them in Dropbox or get them on to your iPad some other way and you can just open them up in MobMuPlat -

I T W O R K S !

And here it is running on my iPad - I added a few objects to the Pd Patch from earlier so that the interface can control the pitch of the sine oscillator and the volume.