Brian Eno has always been more of an AV dork than a rock star. He began his career as “technical advisor” to Roxy Music, he created all those wonderful system sounds for Windows 95, and recently he collaborated with fellow musician/dweeb Peter Chilvers for the soundtrack to the evolutionary escapades of the video game Spore . Don’t let all of his sexy-glammy photos from the ’70s fool you; the dude’s a Nerd with a capital Nerfherder.
The latest dorky addition to Eno’s extensive résumé is Bloom, a music making application for the iPhone created with Spore collaborator Chilvers. According to Wired, the app has two fairly self-explanatory modes, Listen and Create. Listen employs a generative music algorithm to play an off-the-cuff composition, while Create lets the user, you guessed it, create the sounds themselves. When the user taps the screen, a reverb-riddled note sounds and a bluish orb expands then eventually dissipates on the point of contact. The same spot will produce the same note if pressed again, so the program isn’t just a randomly placed series of tones. As with most instruments, the higher up the screen, the higher the note, and vice versa.
The program is also polyphonic and can either generate set tonal patterns or freeze user-generated patterns for easy riffing. It even employs state-of-the-art Etch-a-Sketch technology that lets the user delete their work by giving their iPhone a good shake. Compositions cannot be saved on Bloom, but that’s just as well. I don’t need my already irritating iPhone-having friends shoving their mobile in my face every time they make a minimalist masterpiece. Then again, I’m probably just jealous of them because this application looks really cool. Stupid friends and their stupid expensive phones...
In other Eno news, don’t forget to check out his latest collalbum with David Byrne Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (TMT Review). And here’s one last bizarre Spore video to cap this thing off. God bless us, everyone.
