Want to turn your mobile device into a musical instrument? Or equip your game with interactive audio, rather than canned samples? You can do it with Pure Data (Pd), an open source visual programming environment that lets you manipulate digital audio in real time. This concise book shows you how to use Pd—with help from the libpd library—as an easily embeddable and widely portable sound engine.

Whether you’re an audio developer looking to create musical apps with sophisticated audio capabilities, or an application developer ready to enhance mobile games with real-time procedural audio, Making Musical Apps introduces you to Pd and libpd, and provides hands-on instructions for creating musical apps for Android and iOS.

• Get a crash course in Pd, and discover how to generate and control sounds
• Learn how to create and deploy algorithmic compositions that react to a user’s activity and environment
• Use Java or Objective-C to integrate Pd and libpd into mobile apps
• Learn the steps necessary to build libpd-based apps for Android and iOS

About the Author
Peter Brinkmann is the principal developer behind libpd. He has a PhD in mathematics and has published in pure mathematics, virtual reality, and computer music. He has contributed to several open source projects, was a college professor, and is now a software engineer at Google.

Chapter 1 Introduction

• A Great Investment
• Resources
• Prerequisites

Chapter 2 Making Noise with Pure Data

• Installing Pure Data
• A First Patch
• Adding Audio Input
• Sample Rates and Audio Channels
• Control Rate Objects and Messages
• Sending and Receiving Messages
• More About Messages
• Using MIDI with Pd
• Further Topics

Chapter 3 When Not to Make Musical Apps

• Creating RjDj Scenes
• Anatomy of an RjDj Scene
• Patching for RjDj
• Deploying an RjDj Scene
• Receiving Sensor Input
• Controlling Graphics and Text
• Using rjlib

Chapter 4 Embedding Pure Data with libpd

• Introducing libpd
• API Overview
• Opening Patches
• Finding Resources
• Sending Messages to Pd
• Receiving Messages from Pd
• Reading and Writing Arrays in Pd
• MIDI Support in libpd
• Odds and Ends
• Externals in libpd
• Audio Glue
• Launch Sequence

Chapter 5 Pd for Android

• Setting Up the Development Environment
• Creating a Musical App: Part I
• Creating a Musical App: Part II
• Improving the User Interface
• Building Externals for Android

Chapter 6 Pd for iOS

• Setting Up the Development Environment
• Creating a Musical App: Part I
• Creating a Musical App: Part II
• Improving the User Interface

Chapter 7 Outlook