Music on the PSP

(old stuff. I'd check about PSVita now...)

Making music on the Sony PSP? Seriously? Yes.

On April 2007 I finally got a Sony Play Station Portable (PSP). What a great piece of hardware! Beside playing games, the console revealed an interesting potential for music making, but first of all you have to enable homebrew applications, which requires PSP firmware downgrade/modification. Using the so called custom-firmwares (i.e. hacked official Sony firmwares) opens to you a lot of possibilities in "homebrew" applications. The most notable to me are: emulators (MAME, Sega Genesis, Game Boy etc.), GPS driving applications and, of course, audio/music applications. You'll soon discover how fun is to make music without staying in front of a computer monitor and interacting with a mouse and keyboard.. Much more fun by using the controls provided by the console. The only thing missing in the PSP is a touch screen, but for that you have Nintendo DS ;-)

PSPSEQ - A very interesting program is PSPSeq. As far as I know, it's the first experiment of real sound synthesis on the PlayStation Portable. The author, Ethan Bordeaux, is really nice in answering questions about it. PSPSEQ is a bit tricky to program but the results are quite interesting, fm-ish, 8bit-ish, ... well have a look at it! Unfortunately it's not open-source. Now (beginning 2009) it's in 3.1 release. A nice review on CreateDigitalMusic is here . Few .SEQ files by myself: AZL4F, AZL2D, rockon.seq. Place them into the \seq directory of PSPSeq. NOTE: these files only work with PSPSEQ version 2.10-2.11. Unfortunately they do not work with the new PSPSEQ 3.1. You don't need to have a PSP system in order to run them. Ethan ported the program (release 2.10) also for Windows here. Have a look at the H-Seiken's http://runjump.iiichan.net/ webpage for music produced entirely on the PSP. That's astonishing.

PSPRythm - Another great application for music making on PSP is PSPRythm. This application is sample-based but results are comparable with desktop sampling software. Version 8.0 is out since 2008. Closed-source application, here is the forum. From the PSPRythm Site:

PSPRythm organizes sounds into rhythmic and melodic patterns, and then organizes the patterns into complete, exportable songs. Up to 16 sounds can be simultaneously sequenced with a precise degree of control in up to 64 patterns. These patterns can then be arranged into a song which can consist of up to 999 song steps. The user can then export the completed song as CD quality PCM wave files. ...

RHYTHM uses four pattern mode views (PATTERN, TRACK, WAVE, & EFFECTS) and one song mode view (SONG) to display all song information. Each view has similar control and data input. Each view displays a specific type of information. PATTERN VIEW displays an overview of each pattern. TRACK VIEW displays sound specific pitch information. WAVE VIEW displays sound specific sample information. EFFECTS VIEW displays an overview of the effects applied to each sound

Definitely a must if you are used with sample-based music composition.