Alexandernaut has announced the release of Fugue Machine, a music app exclusively for iPad.
Created by the same developer behind Arpeggionome (featured on the App Store homepage 7/2014) and Arpio (500K+ downloads on the Play Store), FUGUE MACHINE allows you to create beautiful musical patterns with an intuitive user interface.
Fugue Machine is also the first product to come out of an experimental nonprofit incubator at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, located within the historic Grand Movie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. Tours of the theater are available upon request.
Bach in a Box.
FUGUE MACHINE is a tool inspired by composition techniques in Baroque music and Serialism — e.g. Bach’s canons and fugues, and Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique. More specifically, the idea was to design a tool to quickly change a melody’s speed, direction, and pitch, as well as play multiple variations of the melody simultaneously.As it turned out, the best implementation for this was to reimagine one of the most fundamental building blocks of all music sequencers: the piano roll.
The Piano Roll, Reimagined.
FUGUE MACHINE is the world’s first piano roll with multiple playheads, allowing you to:
- Create a music sequence with the piano roll (similar to other music sequencers).
- Then playback the sequence with up to 4 playheads at once — each at various speeds, directions, and pitches (this is the cool part).
With this interface, you see the playheads dance over the music sequence, and hear the complex musical patterns that emerge. It’s mesmerizing.
Fugue Machine is available for purchase for $9.99 USD from the App Store on iPad, and supports iPad 2 and above, running iOS 7 and above.
More information: Alexandernaut / Fugue Machine
