by Sector is a totally unique, vastly powerful, and well-designed beat manipulation tool for iPad that stirs together audio and math in a way that astounds and delights. The description of a “stochastic sample slice sequencer” might scare some off, but fear not: this is a beauty of a beast.
You begin by importing a sampled sound file – a drum app like DM1 is a great place to start, but you can bring in audio files via iTunes, the general pasteboard, or the excellent AudioShare app (created by the same developer as Sector). Once imported, it’s mapped into a circular, looping display, and sliced into a specific number of sectors, or segments (from two to 32 chunks), each with its own color. If you do nothing else and hit the “run” button, the imported sound will simply play back normally.
But things start to get interesting as you program “probability links” by tapping on combinations of different sectors, creating jumps in the playback that are based on randomness and probability. If you want to enforce some order in the chaos, switching to the secondary Seq(uencer) screen lets you hardwire specific sectors to trigger at exact positions in the loop, while still retaining randomness where applicable. While this all surely sounds a bit confusing, the tastefully sparse and colorful interface really helps with the process of learning, alongside the decent online manual — a must-read before going too crazy inside the app.
