Sonic Jamming Signals

Category iPhone
I gotta admit - the iPhone has been the breading ground for a lot of really creative ideas. iNap@Work is one of those apps that you will likely never use but when you see it you gotta have it to try and show off.

With iNap@Work, you cna set a few parameters and your iPhone will emit the noises of productivity in order to cover up your 2 hour nap after lunch. It emmits mouse clicks, keyboard noises, paper crumpling, stapler and pencil sharpener noises You can set each one of them to occur with a certain frequency so as not to get too repetative and be discovered.

This is one of those apps that you will liekly use once or twice (depending on how many people you demo it to) and then never again. But that's kind of what Apple is going after with a $.99 pricing plan. Its a completley disposable income level. Nobody feels too bad spending a buck. And with lots of these cool, quirky apps at a $.99 people are spending a LOT of bucks.

Posted by Dave Gilmore At 12:06 AM Location Studio | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category iPhone music
There are lots of cool apps in the various mobile app stores but SMule's Ocarina takes things to a whole different level. Ocarina is the brainchild of Ge Wang, an associate music professor at Stanford. He runs the Center for Computer Research in Music and Accoustics there as well as co-directs the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO) and the Stanford laptop orchestra, which uses anything electronic it can get its hands on to make music.

Ocarina emulates an ocarina flute for the user, allowing you to blow into the mic of the iPhone and press the virtual valves on the screen to emulate the sounds of the instrument. Its even smart enough to recognize changes in the strength of the breath and you moving the phone around to change pitch and attack.

Wang said he did not write the app for musicians in mind but wrote it to unlock expression and creativity in all of us. And plenty of people have given it a go. Its been downloaded over 700,000 times from the iTunes store, and hundreds, if ont thousands, of YouTube videos are available of people playing songs.  They have even posted instructions for certain songs on the site so you can jump right in and get playing.

Here's one of my favorite YouTube videos for Ocarina. Its Wang playing the theme from The Legend Of Zelda

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Posted by Dave Gilmore At 1:00 PM Location Studio | Permalink | Comments (0)