Urban Floats | An Exploration of Generative Melodies Part 3
For this week's 'music video', I attempted to port over the concepts in the first patch I blogged about, called Meandering Station, into the iOS music platform. Namely, the generative nature of a peaceful piano playing in an urban soundscape. Like in Meandering Station, Urban Floats doesn't require any human input for the music to flow freely (outside of starting it), though, as you can see, I did certainly have some.
It was an interesting exercise, porting over workflows and ideas from one software platform to another. On the desktop, for modular-style music, I use a program called VCV Rack, which imitates a modular Eurorack environment in software.
One of the difficult things about Eurorack modular (at least that I've found) is the need to connect a lot of different modules in order to do even a simple sound. Not only does this take up real estate (or in my case, screen real estate), but because each of these modules fully function on their own in real time, having multiples of these in a software setup often takes up a ton of my computer's CPU power, as well as draining my computer's battery.
A crazy thing is that, these days, an iPad Pro is more powerful than a lot of full-on desktop or laptops. In fact, the current 2020 iPad Pro is more powerful than my 2013 Macbook Pro! Because of this, I've been wanting to see just how much parity I can pull off between my iOS setup and my normal PC setup.
This is (in a way) the first step into that. And what I've found is that iOS, through the use of MIDI control and various VSTs, is much easier to set up initially. By using MIDI control apps like Rozeta to do the modulation and note generation for me, I can have just as much flexible control as a genuine modular system.
There are other advantages in this as well. Because most iOS apps have polyphony (the ability to play multiple notes at the same time), I don't need to worry much about routing multiple different note generators into one (or even multiple) modules. Furthermore, the iOS interface is touch-based, and so I don't always need to attach MIDI controllers to it to be able to change more than one parameter at the same time.
But then, there are disadvantages. This gets a little technical, but MIDI control only has 128 points of change. This is supposed to increase with MIDI 2.0, but that hasn't been implemented yet in most apps (as far as I know). CV is near infinite. This basically means that any change I make won't be very smooth. You can actually see this in the video when you look at how the LFO I've attached to parameters do “jumps” instead of moving smoothly.
The other disadvantage is in the lack of universality in control. In a Eurorack system, CV controls everything. So I can take something like a note generator and plug it into the volume parameter of a module, and let those notes skip that parameter around. In MIDI, you need to find the right control changes (note, control, program, etc.) and you can't criss-cross them like Eurorack. This basically means that, for better or for worse, you're locked into whatever the app creators want you to be locked into, rather than a true 'sandbox' type feel.
It was quite fascinating to think about and do this port. Because of the advantages and disadvantages of both systems, chances are, I won't be fully committing to one or the other. Instead, I'll probably be trying to meld the two systems together, in an attempt to do away with both systems' disadvantages, and hopefully have and more fun way to play music.
I hope you enjoyed! See you next time!