Over the last few days I have been developing solutions for using the iPad as a multitouch device controlling auditory scenes. This will have a very practical and immediate application: At my studio at the art academy I have currently rigged 6 speakers according to the setup required for ICCI 360.
However the desk and laptop is positioned outside the ring of speakers, and with the rather challenging acoustics of the studio it is sometime difficult to sit at the disk and properly hear the effect of the spatial positioning of sources that I am performing. With the iPad, I will be free to move away from the desk and step inside the circle.
Late last week I got a solution working based on Fantastick. This is a straight-forward and well-documented solution. I found the Core 2D drawing functions to be slow, but OpenGL ES rendering is snappy. Starting of fromt he help file, and adding some FTM and MnM magic I now have a working and responsive soltuion for a multitouch cousin of the ICST ambimonitor object, as illustrated here, while busy wrapping the patch into a Jamoma module:
Here is a short demo video of it in action while I’m busy spatialisating all 11 voices of the famous 4’33" piece:
The only potential downside of this solution is that it depends on image files being downloaded to the app from the internet. If the internet is unavailable in a performance situation, it’s a bummer. This is the reason why I yesterday worked on a solution for controlling web sharing from Max, so that the image files can be hosted locally.
Accidentally I discovered another possible strategy today. The Avatron Air Display app turns the iPad into a second screen. As seen below, this makes it possible to use ambimonitor itself on the iPad. Screen updating on the iPad is sort of slowish, and it is not mutlitouch, but the report back to the main Max application of updated position seems fast and reliable, so with the added monitoring possibilities offering of actually having spatialised sound, this would also work quite well as a rapid prototyping solution.
A long term goal will be to be able to create this kind of apps myself, custom-tailored to my particular needs.
