MetaLonsdale App Demo

Abstract

This video shows a demo of MetaLonsdale, a touch-screen musical instrument app for iPad. MetaLonsdale is a collaborative musical instrument originally created for a performance at Everything Nothing Projects at Lonsdale St Traders in Canberra, Australia. The app provides a free-form touch area that can be tapped and swiped to perform field recordings from this venue as well as an array of percussive sounds. GUI switches control a looping function and an autoplay feature that triggers clusters of quiet sounds. The sounds and tonality of the instrument can be shuffled by pressing the “sounds” button.

The app was originally created as a revision of MetaTravels, the prototype app used in Ensemble Metatone's early rehearsals. Improvements in MetaLonsdale included a refined user interface and a sequence of pre-defined scales for pitched sounds that provided a sense of harmonic motion in performances. A network feature enables multiple devices running Meta-Lonsdale on the same WiFi network to find each other automatically and to control each other's tonality, looping, and autoplay functions. Following the premiere performance, MetaLonsdale was integrated into Ensemble Metatone's performance and research practice in 2013 and the app was subsequently released on the iTunes App Store.