This website is by no means a comprehensive guide to all aspects of the iOS musical ecosystem. Its purpose is to provide basic information about some hardware configurations, apps, and creative strategies that I personally have found interesting and useful during my past eleven years of music-making with iOS devices and software. My music features in many of the audio/video examples.
For about the past five years, I have also been using iOS devices with pupils and students, with considerable joy and success. There is a growing demand for workshops and courses for teachers and students, and 2023 looks promising in that respect. Several different formats & platforms are currently in development.
This site is first and foremost intended as support material for those workshops and since I live and teach in Stuttgart, Germany, this site will soon be bilingual English-German. Since many of those workshops are basic introductory courses for teachers and students, I will start with standalone applications which can be useful as first musical encounters for a wide range of pupils and students without knowledge of electronic music. They are intuitive, relatively simple to use (but with enough depth to reward those who are interested) and provide generous results.
With the advent of more powerful devices and increased multi-tasking capabilities (in the past seven years), with a wide range of “host” environments like AUM, Audiobus (among many others) and standards like AUv3 (Audio Units), it is now possible to build complex configurations of apps for a modular approach to sound production and processing which open the door to very advanced possibilities, both for sound design and live performance. Especially the enormous range of MIDI sequencers, for example, makes iOS a very attractive platform for generative music, which will be an important theme here.
