If you have seen Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch display and thought about the musical applications as I did in a previous post about Perceptive Pixel’s technology, then you will surely understand how Apple will effect nothing less than a revolution in music-production soon.
Apple will be introducing multi-touch in the iPhone in June 2007. The iPhone uses multi-touch for zooming in for instance.
Besides, some blogs are abuzz about how Apple plans not to release a Logic 8, but rather a Pro-Tools killer.
Of course Perceptive Pixel also have a current technology to do this, but have a look at Jeff Han’s interview by Loic Lemeur in the current TED conference. The subtext here is that this technology is extremely expensive right now. Besides, I don’t think Perceptive Pixel have internal technology such as Apple’s Logic, which Apple obtained when they bought Emagic.
Multi-touch makes working with applications and data more “organic” and therefore more intuitive. With a multi-touch screen, you can have:
- Two or more simultaneous commands
- Tapping and multi-tapping commands
- Gesture-recognition and motion recognition
- Multi-point gesture recognition
- Pseudo-pressure (by interpreting how large a fingerprint is)
Working with Audio and MIDI with a large Multi-Touch monitor
Have you seen some of the larger iMac screens? They are quite fabulous to work with, aren’t they? Imagine these with multi-touch now, and imagine working with audio and midi in a sequencer with multi-touch:
- I could zoom in and out with a pinching action of thumb and forefinger, narrowing down on a problematic area within a sample’s waveform. Then I could rapidly correct it by selecting the proper function form a menu which pops up through a simple gesture, and touching the waveform.
- I could zoom out and then grab a handful of waveforms in my right hand, and, while dragging the whole workspace with my left hand, place the set of waveforms elsewhere in the sequencer.
- I could slice the waveforms with my hand and resize two waveforms at the same time.
- I could select one waveform with my left hand and by tapping on the right of it with my right hand, repeat it as many times as necessary.
All these actions and more could be imagined for MIDI events as well. I could change a note’s pitch and length by dragging motions. I could also manipulate all MIDI clips in a similar way as with Audio samples.
The revolution in Virtual Instrument Performance and Synthesis
Virtual Instruments is a realm where there will also be a host of new revolutionary features.
First, just imagine that you will also be able to play the virtual instrument on the screen itself. Envision for a moment just routing virtual wires in a huge software modular synth.
Once my performance is recorded, I could then manipulate the Virtual Instrument’s knobs and sliders and other multi-touch interface mapped to various real-time MIDI controllers while I record my performance.
The use of multi-touch here will enable so many combination of simultaneous MIDI control that it will seem nothing short of flabbergasting. The possibilities could several simultaneous use of a type of X-Y-Z controller in a square area with pseudo-pressure for the Z axis, with X, Y and Z mapped to a single or multiple MIDI controllers each.
Of course, I would be able to mix my songs with virtual sliders on the monitor too.
Conclusion
The whole experience of how you make music within a sequencer with virtual instruments is about to be revolutionized by Apple with a forthcoming combination of multi-touch hardware and software based on Logic and running on at least Leopard.
The very act of recording, manipulating and producing music on a computer will become an organic performance in itself.
I don’t know when it’s coming, but I do know it’s soon, probably this year, and it’s going to be Apple and Leopard+.
I am certain I want one already.
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