Contour vs 2099 Techno

Contour is an instrument you play by walking. Four neural decoders sit at the corners of a square. Your finger somewhere in the middle is a blend of all four, and the square is drawn as a survey sheet. The contour lines are not decoration. They come from what those four decoders actually produce, laid out so that equal distances on screen are equal perceptual distances in sound. Cross a line and the sound has changed by a measured amount. THE SHEETS Eleven of them, each a different set of four corners, each chosen by measuring the whole library rather than by ear. They are grouped by what the measurement found: BRIGHT — HEHUAN, the brightest, where all four corners hold their own. CONTRAST — BEIYIDUAN, the widest corner spread at 8.2 times. BREATH — NENGGAO, the breathiest. DEPTH — MABO, the deepest at 53 dB. RANGE — YUSHAN, the widest at 66 semitones; JIAMING, the most focused at 17. They are named after Taiwan's high mountain traverses. PLAYING IT Touch the sheet to sound it. The ribbon underneath sets pitch, or send MIDI and play it from a keyboard. Press harder and the note opens up — the contact patch of your finger is the dynamic. Hold on empty ground to drop a mark you can come back to. The readout above the ribbon tells you where you are while you are there: brightness, noise, the grid reference, the frequency. IN A HOST Contour is also an AUv3 plug-in. It runs in AUM, GarageBand, Cubasis, Logic for iPad and anything else that hosts Audio Units, with the position automatable as two parameters and the sheet recallable with your session. The plug-in draws the same map the app does, laid out for the window a host gives it. WHAT IS FREE Three sheets — BEIYIDUAN, NENGGAO and YUSHAN — with the whole instrument: the map, the ribbon, MIDI, reverb, marks, and the plug-in. No time limit and no account. CONTOUR PRO A single purchase, once, unlocks: • All eleven sheets • Recording, straight to a file • The envelope panel — attack, decay, sustain, release • Composing sheets of your own from the library, 4,845 combinations of four corners, with the map baked for the pitches they share Requires iOS 16 or later. iPhone and iPad.

2099 Techno writes complete tracks. Press generate and you get 76 bars with an intro, builds, two main sections, a breakdown and an outro, played by a virtual-analog engine and a 909-style drum machine. Bass, acid, stabs, pad, a lead line and the kit, through a dub delay, chorus and reverb. Nothing is sampled. Every note is made on the fly and no two tracks come out the same. The music comes from chaos maths. Three Lorenz attractors shape the melody, the rhythm and the mood. Three separate logistic maps run underneath the drums, the bass and the acid line, so they wander independently: turn the logistic control down and the hats and perc repeat every bar, turn it up and they never do. Chaos on its own is noise, so a small model filters it. It gets rewarded for consonant intervals and rehearses two hundred notes over the changes before it writes anything. The CHAOS / TASTE slider decides how much say each one gets. Eight styles, and they are properly different. Detroit rolls an off-beat bass under syncopated stabs. Dub Techno holds one chord for four bars and lets the delay do the work. Acid runs a 303 line with slides and accents. Hard pushes past 140 with a Reese bass and the drive up. Minimal takes most of it away. Every track is built from its seed. Write the seed down and you can have that exact track again, note for note, whenever you want it. You can play over it, too. The pads are the notes of the track's key rather than a piano keyboard, so nothing you touch is wrong, and the sixteen-step lane runs in time with the track and follows your host. Both play any part you like: bass, acid, stabs, pad or lead, through that part's sound and out on its MIDI channel. Choose which sections the lane plays in - just the breakdown, say - and preview it on its own without starting the track. Turn on RADIO and it keeps playing, picking a new key, mode, style, sound kit and tempo for each track. You also get: • 8 styles, 6 dark modes, 12 keys, tempo and density • Two-oscillator analog voice with sub, noise, resonant filter and glide • 22 presets and 9 sound kits, from Warehouse to Game Boy, plus random patch • Six-part mixer, dub delay, chorus, plate reverb and a global sweep filter • A PLAY panel: pads in the track's own key, and a 16-step lane with accent and slide, running in time with the track and only in the sections you pick • MIDI in, so your keyboard plays whichever part you have selected • MIDI export: six tracks, one per part • Live spectrum, waveform and a view of the chaos engine at work Two Audio Units, an instrument and a MIDI processor. Each part sends on its own MIDI channel, drums on 10, so one instance can drive six instruments. The MIDI version passes your keyboard through instead of swallowing it. Both follow your host's tempo and transport. One install registers both. The app is free and nothing in it is held back. Using the Audio Units inside other apps is a one-time purchase, and each AUv3 session plays for two minutes first so you can try them properly.