Making Musical Apps: Using the libpd Sound Engine

Do you want to turn your smartphone into a musical instrument? Are you thinking about equipping a game with real-time procedural audio instead of relying on canned samples? If so, then Pure Data and libpd are for you. Pure Data (Pd) is an open-source graphical programming environment for digital audio that has been popular in computer music circles for more than a decade. libpd is a library that turns Pd into an easily embeddable and widely portable sound engine.

Making Musical Apps explains how to integrate Pd and libpd into mobile apps for Android and iOS, with special emphasis on the interface between Pd programs, known as patches, and the application code. Audio developers will learn how to prepare patches for use with libpd, and application developers will learn how to control patches with the libpd API. Readers with knowledge of both digital audio and mobile development will be able to create complete musical apps.

The book begins with a crash course in Pd, just enough to allow new users to generate and control sounds, followed by an overview of existing solutions for rapidly deploying Pd patches to mobile devices. After a thorough discussion of the libpd API in both Java and Objective-C, the book walks readers through the implementation of sample apps for both Android and iOS that illustrate all aspects of libpd development, from the integration of libpd into the development setup to the use of advanced features.