Random Access Remixing on the iPad

Remixing audio samples is a common technique for the creation of electronic music, and there are a wide variety oftools available to edit, process, and recombine pre-recordedaudio into new compositions. However, all of these toolsconceive of the timeline of the pre-recorded audio and theplayback timeline as identical. In this paper, we introducea dual time axis representation in which these two timelines are described explicitly. We also discuss the randomaccess remix application for the iPad, an audio sample editor based on this representation. We describe an initialuser study with 15 high school students that indicates thatthe random access remix application has the potential todevelop into a useful and interesting tool for composers andperformers of electronic music.