Full-Featured iPhone Synthesizer Coming Soon to the App Store

by Jody Mitoma on August 8, 2008 at 9:25 pm

Noise.IO is making progress on the first full-featured iPhone synth application, which is set to be released on August 25th within the App Store for $6.99.

There are a couple of other iPhone synthesizers out there, but none of which have enough features to do anything really all that great. We’ve got the Beatmaker, which is essentially a music arranger with a mini-sequencer, sampler, and drum machine. And we’ve also go the iPhone Synth, but it is a very basic synthesizer with few adjustable parameters, and it isn’t available as an official iTunes application.

So, as of now, there are no official iPhone Synthesizers available for download via the Apple App Store - that is - until August 25th.

Take a look at the first video previewing the upcoming application:

This amazing little synthesizer uses “ESFM technology - Enhanced Subspace Frequency Modulation. It’s an improved version of FM which has been developed especially for iPhone, the architecture has been redesigned to allow maximum user-friendly approach to creating new sounds.” It comes with 81preset sounds, tap tempo, tape BPM sync and in interesting grid-based modulation matrix.

The developers of this application will also be releasing a desktop PC version near the end of the year.
Here’s what the developer says about the ESFM technology:

ESFM is the new approach to Frequency Modulation method (which is best suited for making noise-based sounds and sound effects) which allows editing presets in a very evident manner. Currently there are four operators that comprise the sound: Brother, Sister (waveform oscillators), Noizer (multiband noise oscillator), Filter (active multifilter module). All the operators can modulate (modify the nature of) themselves or another operator in a static or dynamic (via LFO or user’s gestures / accelerometer) ratio, this allows to create an immerse range of sounds.

At this stage, Noise.io is not intended to be polyphonic. The work chain looks like this: you fire up the Control Surface, and start sliding your fingers across the iPhone screen (just like in Korg’s Kaosspad or Kaossilator). Sounds are generally huge and massive, contain post-FX (especially my favorite “space swooshes”) and introducing polyphony seriously affects performance which is not acceptable for us.

This looks like it may become a hit.

(via Noise Addicts)

One Response to “Full-Featured iPhone Synthesizer Coming Soon to the App Store”

Eric March said:

August 8th, 2008 at 11:33 pm

So basically it’s like a Korg Prophesy but without all the physical modelling. Interesting idea, but without polyphony it’s only good for use as a lead/backing/bass synth accompanying a larger ensemble. I’m still interested in hearing what this thing can do though.