Oct 09 2008
Brian Eno comes up with Bloom, an ambient music app for iPhone
Posted by: Maria Mihale in Apple, News
Brian Eno, widely known as the father of ambient music and one of the greatest musical minds of our contemporary epoch, is the composer of the music for the Windows 95 project. When he was approached in 1994 by designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk, he created the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, which was called The Microsoft Sound.

There’s a confession in the San Francisco Chronicle, where he said that “the idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while, and was quite lost, actually, and I really appreciated someone coming along and saying “Here’s a specific problem – Solve it!†[…] “And it must be 3¼ seconds long". I thought it was so funny, and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made eighty-four pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to miscroseconds, at the end of this, that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then, when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were, like, three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of timeâ€.
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Today, Brian Eno was once again approached by the musician/programmer Peter Chilvers, but this time to create one of the coolest iPhone applications that was ever designed. The project was dubbed Bloom and it’s “part instrument, part composition and part artworkâ€.
Most music-creation applications take an existing musical instrument and stuff it in a very awkward way into the phone, but compared to those Bloom creates from scratch an entirely new “instrumentâ€, which is, of course, designed for the iPhone and for the iPhone only. A very important aspect is that everyone can play with Bloom, generating and visualizing ambient music. It’s a little bit hard to explain the mechanism, but you’re provided with a colored screen and a quiet drone and you should tap the screen in different places, at random, in order to generate sounds. The sounds you play repeat themselves from time to time, forming a composition.

When you get bored, you can either shake the screen and your work up until that moment will be cleared, or tap anywhere else, so that more sounds are added. If you’re not in an inspirational mood, you can also let Bloom create music on its own and listen to it, especially because the application comes up with a unique piece every time you run it. Once you have something you like, you have the possibility to freeze the piece you’ve created, so new notes will be no longer introduced. In addition, the tones correspond to colored spots appearing on your display and slowly fading.
If you are familiar with Eno’s work you might have expected this application as he has always been interested in exploiting the latest technologies and platforms for his artworks. As a consequence, you can now witness several Eno-inspired tools and toys available on Apple platforms.
Bloom is available on the App Store for $3.99 and addresses to all of you out there interested in ambient music or, why not, music in general.
(Source TheAppleBlog)






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