Eleven sheets of measured ground, an AUv3 plug-in, and a map whose contour lines are measurements — cross one and the sound has changed by a known amount.
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.
Sounds great but need the ability to save multiple user sounds. Also the sheets don’t load inside of AUM.
Developer Response
Thanks for report. Both are fixed in 1.0.1, out soon this week. Baked sheets take their brightest corner's name; rename and delete are under EDIT on the USER header in the sheet menu. In AUM your own sheets are listed, and changing the sheet now changes the sound. zhi
Exports from your DAW come out clean, and a MIDI keyboard plugged into the app finally plays it.
In the app
• A MIDI keyboard plays Contour. It never did: every message from an external controller was misread and dropped.
• Recordings play back at the speed and pitch you played them. On most iPhones they came out about three times slower and more than an octave and a half low.
• Sound comes back after a phone call, Siri, an alarm, or plugging in headphones. Before, the instrument stayed silent until you quit and reopened it.
• Stopping a recording no longer freezes the screen, and a recording that fails says so instead of doing nothing.
• One damaged sheet file no longer hides every sheet you have baked.
• Previewing and baking a sheet takes about half the time.
• With nothing playing, nothing recording and no keyboard connected, Contour no longer keeps running in the background. With a keyboard connected it plays on as before.
• VoiceOver can buy Pro, restore a purchase, and close the Pro and Settings panels. None of their buttons could be reached before.
With a keyboard, in the app and in a host
• Playing legato no longer cuts off the note you are holding when you lift the one before it.
• Pitch bend returns to the note when the wheel comes back. In the app it used to climb further with every message.
• In the plug-in, the sustain pedal, pitch bend and aftertouch all work, and stopping the transport releases every held note.
In a host
• Exports and bounces are clean. A host renders an export much faster than real time and Contour could not keep up, so most of the file was silence broken by fragments of sound. It now renders at whatever speed the host asks, and the same project exports the same way every time.
• Exports keep the release and the reverb tail instead of cutting them off where the region ends.
• Notes land where the host places them. They were moved to the start of each buffer — up to 85 ms early in a large one.
• Automation ramps sweep instead of jumping straight to the end.
• Latency stays the same from the moment the plug-in loads, and long sessions over Bluetooth or USB audio no longer start to drop out.
• Deleting a sheet you baked no longer silences the one that is playing, and a saved project always reopens on the sheet it was saved with.
Thank you to the player who wrote in about exports.
Version 1.0.4
The developer, Chih Han Lin, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
Seller
Chih Han Lin
Size
113.5 MB
Category
Music
Compatibility
Requires iOS 16.0 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 16.0 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 16.0 or later.
Mac Requires macOS 13.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.