Making Musical Apps: Real-time audio synthesis on Android and iOS

by Peter Brinkmann

Overview

Want to turn your mobile device into a musical instrument? Or equip your game with interactive audio, rather than canned samples? You can do it with Pure Data (Pd), an open source visual programming environment that lets you manipulate digital audio in real time. This concise book shows you how to use Pd—with help from the libpd library—as an easily embeddable and widely portable sound engine.

Whether you’re an audio developer looking to create musical apps with sophisticated audio capabilities, or an application developer ready to enhance mobile games with real-time procedural audio, Making Musical Apps introduces you to Pd and libpd, and provides hands-on instructions for creating musical apps for Android and iOS.

• Get a crash course in Pd, and discover how to generate and control sounds
• Learn how to create and deploy algorithmic compositions that react to a user’s activity and environment
• Use Java or Objective-C to integrate Pd and libpd into mobile apps
• Learn the steps necessary to build libpd-based apps for Android and iOS

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449314903
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	02/29/2012
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.19(h) x 0.26(d)

About the Author

Peter is the principal developer behind libpd. He has a PhD in mathematics and has published in pure mathematics, virtual reality, and computer music. He has contributed to several open source projects, was a college professor, and is now a software engineer at Google.

Table of Contents

Preface; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; Safari® Books Online; How to Contact Us; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: Introduction; 1.1 A Great Investment; 1.2 Resources; 1.3 Prerequisites; Chapter 2: Making Noise with Pure Data; 2.1 Installing Pure Data; 2.2 A First Patch; 2.3 Adding Audio Input; 2.4 Sample Rates and Audio Channels; 2.5 Control Rate Objects and Messages; 2.6 Sending and Receiving Messages; 2.7 More About Messages; 2.8 Using MIDI with Pd; 2.9 Further Topics; Chapter 3: When Not to Make Musical Apps; 3.1 Creating RjDj Scenes; 3.2 Anatomy of an RjDj Scene; 3.3 Patching for RjDj; 3.4 Deploying an RjDj Scene; 3.5 Receiving Sensor Input; 3.6 Controlling Graphics and Text; 3.7 Using rjlib; Chapter 4: Embedding Pure Data with libpd; 4.1 Introducing libpd; 4.2 API Overview; 4.3 Opening Patches; 4.4 Finding Resources; 4.5 Sending Messages to Pd; 4.6 Receiving Messages from Pd; 4.7 Reading and Writing Arrays in Pd; 4.8 MIDI Support in libpd; 4.9 Odds and Ends; 4.10 Externals in libpd; 4.11 Audio Glue; 4.12 Launch Sequence; Chapter 5: Pd for Android; 5.1 Setting Up the Development Environment; 5.2 Creating a Musical App: Part I; 5.3 Creating a Musical App: Part II; 5.4 Improving the User Interface; 5.5 Building Externals for Android; Chapter 6: Pd for iOS; 6.1 Setting Up the Development Environment; 6.2 Creating a Musical App: Part I; 6.3 Creating a Musical App: Part II; 6.4 Improving the User Interface; Chapter 7: Outlook;