[vimeo 61294390]
I wanted to add another tool to the mobile toolkit I use for multimodal composition in keeping with a prior post, so consider this post more an addendum to that mobile toolkit post. I have been toying a lot recently with audio applications that allow for composition, including
- Garage Band
- Air, Scape, Trope, Bloom (all Brian Eno)
- Soundgrid
Most of these have recording functions and Garage Band goes so far as to allow for sampling (ie, recording human voices or ambient sounds and using those as the basis for the music). Not being a musician myself, I need something that is relatively easy to use but still powerful enough to compose something worthwhile. I want to compose 1-2 minute segments for video pieces I make, mosaics, or other multimodal compositions. I tend to assume that a little music, if complementary to the images being shown, produces a more palatable aesthetic effect. So I toy whenever possible with mobile applications that allow me to score these compositions. Ideally, I would want to score these from mobile locations: the Tube, the train, or sitting on the front stoop of my wife’s house in Long Island waiting for her to return from a run. Everything in this post was composed in the last locale.
Figure App
The Figure App certainly meets all these requirements. It is intuitive enough for non-musicians (the whole interface just screams out for touching), it has enough export options to be portable, and can then be pulled into iMovie for some quick collaging, editing, and producing to iTunes. All of it via mobile. It is slightly more intuitive than Garage Band, but slightly less powerful and versatile. Which is fine for most of the kinds of projects I am working on. So if you need to score something relatively quickly and painlessly, I recommend it.
The video above was thrown together in about 10 minutes using the audio I generated from Figure (yes, it is an original score) and images I am using and reusing for my thesis in iMovie all via mobile technology.
