Swarovski Refract

This is a music iphone/ipad app I made with Multiadaptor and
Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) for Swarovski. It’s a program for creating audio-visual compositions.

You make triangles by touching the screen in 3 places. The shape, size and position determines the pitch, volume and tonal quality of the sound, the horizontal distance between each triangle in either direction is related to the interval between the notes. Changing the shape of the triangle blends the sound between different samples.

You can double-tap anywhere to reveal an extras menu that allows you to choose a drum beat, add delay, or atmospheric effects.

Under the hood, it’s all openframeworks, and there’s a custom audio engine. I started making the engine using libpd but it wasn’t fast enough to handle all the sounds playing at once, so I made one losely based on thump.

Another challenge was to fake the anti-aliasing on the iPhone using textures. Luckily I found this method by Philip Rideout, and used it everywhere.

Get the app (for free)