Flowfal

Use movement from one or more smartphones or smartwatches to control audio and MIDI in Ableton Live

Flowfal is a system that allows control of Ableton Live using motion from one or more Apple or Android phones or smartwatches. These devices, running the Flowfal App, send data to Ableton Live over a low-latency WiFi link.

Inside Ableton Live the Flowfal data is received by a set of plug-ins that act on this movement data in different ways.

As well as controlling Ableton Live parameters, movement data can gate the MIDI input to a track. MIDI notes can be produced or transposed, and MIDI Continuous Controller data can be sent to control external MIDI equipment.

Flowfal allows Ableton Live users to add movement as an input method for creating music. This can be useful in the studio, but it really comes into its own in a live setting.

Flowfal allows users to add more visually interesting movement to electronic music performances.

For players of non-electronic instruments, Flowfal allows effects to be added with movement - for example, it has been used by a Violinist to add effects to their playing.

Attention has been paid to how the movement data can be used usefully in musical ways so the latency of the system is very low and there are filtering options on all the movement inputs.

As Thunkist, Simon East creates live music installations where up to 4 audience members are given control of the music.

Smartwatches embedded in digital wands are handed out to the audience and they then control how the music sounds and evolves. These installations often use surround sound and the wands can be used to control where in the 360 surround space the sounds are produced.

This produces a totally immersive and interactive event for the audience.

There are a whole set of Flowfal Ableton plugins that use movement data to produce or process MIDI data. Movement data can be used to:

- create a MIDI note (with movement data controlling the note value and the volume)
- transpose a stream of MIDI notes
- gate the output of a stream of MIDI notes when a threshold is reached
- MIDI CC data can be produced

Flowfal is now available to buy as a subscription service for £30 a year (approx 35 USD or EUR).

We will be adding more plugins to process Flowfal data - for example a MPE MIDI plugin. We will be adding Apple Watch support. We are looking at other DAWs that we might be able to support.