Ian Brown @igb
During quarantine I’ve been reading this book about the UPIC electro-acoustic graphical composition tool. zkm.de/en/from-xenaki…
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It’s a fascinating artifact. Reading the account of its development inspired me to get Fof back up and running. apps.apple.com/us/app/fof/id1…
The field of graphical and drawing-centric tools to create music or code or other non-visual media seems underexplored.
In the age of the iPhone and iPad it seems like there’s an opportunity to do more with their ubiquitous and sophisticated UIs.
There’s a somewhat buggy and unpolished version of UPIC for the iOS by the Centre Iannis Xenakis¹ apps.apple.com/us/app/upisket…
¹ Xenakis was the creator of the original UPIC.
Here’s a screenshot of it’s composition interface:
It’s surprising that there aren’t more tools or apps with this approach, but outside of visualizations like Malinowski’s music machine... youtube.com/watch?v=OxM--m…
...there’s not much in the way of visual-first creative tools.
Anyway, the UPIC book is available as a free PDF. It’s worth browsing and the history of UPIC’s predecessors is fascinating.
Here’s a link to the PDF zkm.de/en/system/file…