Recording - January 2016 - 49

And now for something completely
and totally different! We've featured
iMusicAlbum in our pages before, with
the Audio Mastering Studio app
(October 2013), and we have reviews
of new recording and effects plug-ins
coming up in future issues... but as a fun
way to wind up this iOS collection of
worthwhile iOS noisemakers, here's a
quick glimpse of the psychotic-sounddesigner side of iMusicAlbum's Igor
Vasiliev.
SoundScaper and FieldScaper are
designed to create "soundscapes",
audio landscapes that provide texture
and backdrop for soundtrack
work, unusual instrumental
breaks, ambient/meditation
music, and more. They're not
played in the sense of traditional instruments-you set
them up and let them go,
they produce evolving and
shifting sonic textures, and
you capture the results for
use elsewhere.
Only a few months since it
was released, SoundScaper
is already much beloved of
sound designers for its deep
and extremely twisted
approach to sound mangling.
It was originally conceived as
a sort of miniature laboratory
for playing with circuit bending-the deliberate rewiring
or miswiring of audio electronics to produce unexpected sounds. You're given three
oscillators, each of which
mimics an 8-bit audio playback chip, and you can then
go in and mess with stuff like
clock speed, triggering, how data is read
off the various pins on the chip, artifacts,
overload, and much more. Your starter
sounds come from a built-in library of
over 100 short samples of nature sounds,
animals, mechanical and electronic
devices, struck metals, and so forth... but
by the time you get done messing with
them, they'll be turned into glitchy, ratchety, fascinatingly evolving noises.
The three oscillators can then be
placed in a virtual "landscape" on the
main screen, where you can set up
where they live and how their sounds

move around from left to right or forward
and back. There's a multimode filter and
delay for each oscillator, LFOs to control
how the sound sources move, and a
Record button to capture the results.
Many parameters can be automated by
double tapping them to open a special
window. Other hidden windows give you
advanced delay settings, EQ and reverb
controls in the mixer, and lots more.
The end result is constantly moving
and changing sound that can have elements of static, glitchiness, repetition/stuttering, or smoother effects due to filtering
and delay. Use caution when starting to
work with the app: it's easy to get confused if you don't have an electronics
background. Turn on only one oscillator,
open its Control window, then deactivate
all of the Address Circuit enable buttons
and turn Artifacts and Overload to zero.
You should hear a looped playback of
the loaded sample, clearly and without
any glitching. Try different controls one
at a time to hear how they affect the
sound, and you'll be on your way!
FieldScaper is similar to SoundScaper
in its basic architecture:
three oscillators blended and
tweaked to create looping
audio textures. However,
FieldScaper is a bit simpler
and has a slightly different
focus: the three oscillators
can play back prerecorded
samples, but the app is
designed to let you quickly
grab field recordings of
music, outdoor ambiences,
or anything else you can
think of, and process those
on the fly.
Each oscillator's recording
controls let you manually stop
and start recording, have the
app listen for sound in order
to start, and stop via a timer
or when it encounters silence
(great for recording single
events like a car door slamming or a bird's song). Once
the recording is looping and
playing back, you can select
from a menu of processor
presets which include settings
reminiscent of SoundScaper. There's a filter, distortion, delay, reverb, and
pan/depth mixer, along with a hugely
simplified address-glitching control: push
a button and move two sliders until you
hear what you like.
If you like the idea of messing around
with recorded audio but the really deep
circuit-bending stuff in SoundScaper
sounds too intimidating, then you'll find
FieldScaper a great little app to play
with. Both apps are guaranteed to give
you sounds that no one's ever heard the
like of before.
RECORDING January 2016

http://www.uncommonstudiosla.com http://www.mojaveaudio.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - January 2016