Harness the Power of Gesture-Based Loops with Your Fingertips

Touch-based mobile devices allowed interactive, gesture-based music production to hit the masses. So far, this type of musical creation hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. But SoundBow, a drawing-based musical instrument app, should shake things up a little bit with its clean, minimal visual interface and mesmerizing potential for complex, loop-based music production.

Users create music by drawing curves over the screen. SoundBow, created by the Binaura coding and interactive design collective, remembers these gestures and plays them back in continuous loops.

“Each time your ever-looping gesture hits a string, a sound is produced,” Binaura explains on its website. “Apart from drawing, you can experiment by moving the strings around freely to rescale your instrument. Record your own sounds through the microphone and start creating melodies, soundscapes with your own voice. If you wish, you can also export your composition as an audio file.”

Binaura notes that they made SoundBow with free and open-source tools. They built the interface with OpenFrameworks, and made the sound engine with SodaLib, a free Data Sonification Library built on libPd. The source for the web version of SoundBow is open and freely available from the Chrome Experiment’s Github repository, where users can tweak and fork it.

SoundBow from binaura on Vimeo.

Click here to check out more Binaura projects.

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