Making Musical Instruments on iOS

This past week I gave a talk at the Renaissance.io conference on creating musical instruments for iOS.

The aim of the talk was to demystify how Core Audio generates sound at a low level, starting with the basics of sound itself and moving from pure noise to a basic instrument in just a few steps.

Animation: The relationship between the geometry of a circle, and sine waves.

I ended by scratching the surface of how iOS developers can benefit from the Clojure's Overtone community by applying functional programming concepts to musical app making.

Below are a handful of GitHub repositories. They're all open source, and move from generating pure white noise and basic tones, to 'shaped' sounds with user interaction. Finally, the ColorTones project pulls these concepts together to create a synthesized drum pad. The musical notes are generated by CTMusicHelper - a set of functions ported from Overtone to Objective-C.

I encourage you to checkout the code, and look forward to seeing what you make with it.

White Noise

Sine Wave

Noise Trigger

Shaped Noise

Harmonic Drone

Color Tones

Further Info

I'd like to port my slide presentation to my website, time permitting. If that's something you're interesting in seeing, follow me on twitter and let me know.