Phone? Pffft. Effects Box!

I think I've just fallen in love.

This app for the iPhone is essentially a PD (PureData) patch player (like the Max Runtime app), with defined inputs of a mic, an accelerometer, and a touchscreen. This may be the thing that makes me actually decide to give PD a try, fully 3? 4? years after Jon Lamm told all of us it was the best shit since sliced bread. MAKEblog tutorial here. In that article, Mike mentions that the only way to get your patches onto the iThing (as the rjdj devs call the generic i*) is by jailbreaking and using ssh, but on the developer wiki someone has written a little webserver in Python that does the job nicely. The app seems to be hard-coded to only accept http downloads starting with the "rjdj://" protocol string, and only from the host rjdj.me, but you can get around that by using proxy settings on the device's wifi connection. Instructions here. (scroll near the bottom)

The patch I've been rocking nearly non-stop is called Eargasm. It sounds like the mic input is acting as the modulator to excite a vocoder, where the carrier is this lush pad that sounds like a major-7th chord (or interval). Top that off with dotted-eighth delay where the echoes alternate between the left and right channel and a highpass filter whose cutoff rises as you get further into the delay feedback. In other words: turn on the faucet or step into the wind, and you have instant acid flashback. Tap on some shit with a pencil or type on a keyboard, and you have instant dub plate backing track. I'll try to post links to some recordings of this stuff soon. (Oh yeah--the app records .wav files of live + processed input.)

Maybe this is somehow connected to the "space cake" guy.