Apres midi

One of the most powerful components in music creating is the element of surprise. The moment you play a note that you did not intended or when someone you music with harmonizes something differently and it opens up a new world. Those moments are for me quite rare in a digital environment, often there’s either too much control or completely random. This prototype is a first out of many ideas where the maker of sound can use their smartphone or tablet to control parameters of their synthesizer, in this case the modwheel and pitchbend. What this does, at least for me, is opens up for the element of surprise while still maintaining a bit of the control. It’s also a very fun way of interacting with common controls in a new way.

I think that using the browser for MIDI makes a lot of sense and opens up for so much potential. In this case it’s only about sending modwheel and pitchbend values with a smartphone but the sky is the limit really. And what I think is innovative and game changing about it is that it does not require a download, it’s a link a way to start playing. Using the browser also opens up for so many new ways of thinking about user interfaces and I think that there is a possibility to be a lot more free than if building an actual plugin since both the production and distribution cost is so much smaller. So, this prototype is just scratching the surface of a huge potential and a ton of creative midi-instruments online. A footnote is that currently, some browsers (Safari) does not support the WebMidi API. I have also only tested this prototype with smartphone devices running iOS.

As mentioned before, I think the most inspiring use is that you start using the pitchbend and modwheel in a new way. Not thinking about them as a pitchbend and a modwheel but as something physical and that makes me play my synthesizers in a totally different way. It does not replace the pitchbend and modwheel, it adds new functionality to them. Another thing that has been inspiring is using a DAW and mapping the values to other parameters such as the wetness of a reverb or delay time of a delay. A functionality that I hope to build into the next instrument.