To create an application targeted for one man bands, specifically electronic musicians playing live shows.
When building an electronic soundscape, you need to spend a lot of time building up layer after layer of sound to create something that sounds nice and appealing.
Furthermore, due to the freeform nature of adding in synth notes and different sounds when building up such a song, you need a less rigid piece way of editing notes compared to the timeline approach of normal audio editors where you place notes on squares to determine when they are played.
Finally, you often want visually appealing and abstract visualizers that match up with the sounds the audience is listening to.
The proposed solution is an app that provides the following features to differentiate itself from other audio editors:
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Notes are played by clicking at any point on a canvas, releasing a burst of color and playing a synth whose pitch is determined by the mouse's position. Notes that you have played in the past are added to a scrolling timeline that is separate from the canvas. The relative positioning of notes on the timeline is determined by the intervals between playing the notes, and the length of a note is determined by how long the mouse button is depressed for. More characteristics such as pitch wavering and fading volume in and out could be controlled using controlled mouse movements and the scroll wheel.
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After playing a good sequence of notes, the artist can select some bars or a section from the timeline and loop it. This creates a layer in the background that plays continuously, replaying both the audio and the visuals from the loop. The artist is then switched on to a new layer, with a different color to help differentiate the layer they are currently working on from the previous layers. They could also select a new synth to play on the layer from some prebuilts, or define a new synth.
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The artist then continues playing sounds and looping them as necessary, eventually building up a song filled with many different synths and sounds.
This approach provides a few advantages.
- The artist can switch between freely improvising and looping back sounds.
- Visuals are automatically generated as the artist builds up the song.
- Sounds are played in a much more free-form fashion, making it easier to play sounds at exactly the time you want them to.
There are also a few disadvantages that might be overcome by focusing our target audience:
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It becomes more difficult for budding musicians without a good sense of precision and rhythm to play sounds that are on-time. With electronic musicians playing synths at a live show, a good sense of timing is already assumed and, unlike the beat driving the show, synths do not need to be played exactly on time to sound appealing.