Image rights from top: roboheadz, Noted.
Wooo-eeee-oooo-eee! From
The Beach Boys to B-movies,
the sound of the Theremin is
a big part of pop culture.
AirSynth aims to bring it to your iPhone.
Real Theremins use two proximity–
sensing antennas to generate sounds:
one for the pitch and one for the volume.
AirSynth uses the front–facing depth-
sensing camera on your iPhone X or later
and tracks your hands when they’re
about six inches above the device. As with
a real Theremin, the proximity of your
hands raises or lowers pitch and volume.
There are six different voices to
choose from, and they all have the same
While many note–taking apps
enable you to mix and match
written and audio notes,
Noted puts the audio bit
first: you add notes or tags to the audio
recording. It’s particularly well suited
to lectures, meetings, readings,
conversations, and anything else when
you might want to highlight key bits of
a spoken conversation or presentation.
The latest version addresses some
irritations, and introduces useful new
features. Sync is faster, photos taken in
the app are now saved to your Camera
Roll (you can override this in Settings),
you can indent text in the editor, and you
AirSynth
A Theremin synth? Not exactly
$1.99 From Roboheadz Ltd, roboheadz.com
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 12.0 or later
Noted
Audio recording with bells on
Free (IAPs) From Noted, notedapp.io
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 10.0 or later
WEAKEXCELLENTYou’ll need a FaceID camera to detect your
hands when controlling pitch and volume.Noted enables you to add timestamped text
and drawn images to audio recordings.thing in common: they don’t sound
remotely like a Theremin. This, we
humbly suggest, is a bit of a problem for
an app that calls itself a Theremin
synthesiser. It’s largely because a real
Theremin can span anywhere from four
to seven octaves, but AirSynth just does
one. That means no Good Vibrations and
no cheesy ’50s sci-fi sound effects, just
a fiddly and limited way to trigger some
pretty basic synth sounds. There’s no
customization, no reverbs, no delays.
AirSynth simply doesn’t do what it’s
supposed to do. If the Theremin’s your
thing, we suggest checking out Theremin
I/O or E–Theremin MKII, a synth app suchcan now control playback from the lock
screen or from Control Center.
One of the most useful new features
is the Apple Pencil support for iPad Pro,
which enables you to add your own
handwriting, doodles, or diagrams to
your notes.
The app also introduces AI–powered
tag suggestions. This leverages Apple’s
CoreML framework to suggest suitable
hashtags: for example, type #NASA and
its suggestions include #OneSmallStep.
The free version only stores five notes,
and while you can delete unwanted ones
to make space it’s a pain. A subscription
gives you unlimited notes, PDF export,as Minimoog Model D, or a multipurpose
noise maker such as iAbyssal. Not only
do they make better noises, but they
work on more devices and you can use
them with other music apps.
THE BOTTOM LINE. AirSynth isn’t
a Theremin synthesiser, it’s a gimmicky
sound maker. CARRIE MARSHALLnoise reduction and an equalizer,
something that’s particularly useful
when there’s a lot of ambient noise or
when someone’s softly spoken. That’s
$2.49 a month or $23.99 per year.
THE BOTTOM LINE. Easy and
effective notetaking, now with the power
of Apple Pencil. CARRIE MARSHALLmaclife.comAUG 2019 57Tough testing, trusted ratings