Shashaank is a young 14-year old composer and student who has learned iOS Development to build the new app, mTonal. It’s a microtonal quarter-note synth and MPE controller built with AudioKit.
We’re going to turn it over to the creator of mTonal to tell his story:
The idea for this project came when I was faced with a problem while composing microtonal music. I wanted to experiment with different quarter-tone chords and melodies before writing it down, like I do with a normal piano.
However, there was no such app on the market that had a quarter-tone keyboard layout, and unfortunately the few physical microtonal instruments available on the market are very expensive. Therefore, I sought out to create an inexpensive and portable solution that musicians can use to explore the microtonal realm of music. With the keyboard layout similar to a piano, other musicians who want to write microtonal compositions can quickly start experimenting with the music instead of scrambling to figure out how the app works.
I decided to use AudioKit for the sound synthesis after exploring the framework’s features. Originally, the app was going to be built with libPd. However, that idea was dropped after discovering AudioKit.
AudioKit is much easier to use and more versatile and flexible for the app’s needs. Thanks to Dr. Aurelius Prochazka and the team for creating this framework. I was able to easily extend the functionality of AudioKit’s base objects to develop this app to accommodate mTonal’s gliding feature. Even after iOS 12 released in September, I was able to clone the latest copy from Github and compile the framework myself for the Xcode project.
Great work, Shashaank!
skeflect.com/mTonal
