RjDj makes soundtrack of your life
There are lots of jockeys around today -- you may have seen "smell jockeys" who launch incense and herbal essences about the dancefloor at your local discotheque. But Reality Jockey Ltd has released an iPhone app that sets out to mix reality itself into music.
RjDj album ($2.99, App Store) and its inevitable free variant, RjDj Single (Free, App Store), allow anybody to use their headset to beatbox or simply use the sounds around them to make music.
RjDj works by letting you record into different "Scenes" made by different artists, each one having its own method of processing the sound it records (and a nice little picture to go with it). The different scenes are really quite diverse, and some of the scenes even allow you to affect the mix you're making by making use of the iPhone's accelerometer. Unfortunately, I found RjDj's publicity material does not really convey what is possible with its app, so you might want to take a look at all the interesting concepts at their artists and scenes webpage -- the information you can find there is much more compelling than the description on the App Store or with their demo version, which gives scant information.
I experimented for a little while with "Echolon" by Guenter Geiger, which is also the scene provided with the demo version of RjDj. After playing around with it for a while with claps and hums I was left a little disappointed, feeling that the recording sounds were just being relayed back to me in slightly distorted echoes.
However, I then tried "Gridwalker" by F. Barknecht, and was extremely impressed. This was a scene that took the noises around you and truly made it into something that seemed like music. This is the scene that they should have provided with the demo version; it's extremely impressive and also fun to use. It also simply sounds great.
In future, the developers say they will add more free scenes to the app, as well as the ability to buy extra scenes as separate downloads within the app.
This has strong potential to be a very successful app -- for the layman as well as the experimental musician -- and certainly starts to nudge the iPhone a little further into the arts realm.
RjDj album ($2.99, App Store) and its inevitable free variant, RjDj Single (Free, App Store), allow anybody to use their headset to beatbox or simply use the sounds around them to make music.
RjDj works by letting you record into different "Scenes" made by different artists, each one having its own method of processing the sound it records (and a nice little picture to go with it). The different scenes are really quite diverse, and some of the scenes even allow you to affect the mix you're making by making use of the iPhone's accelerometer. Unfortunately, I found RjDj's publicity material does not really convey what is possible with its app, so you might want to take a look at all the interesting concepts at their artists and scenes webpage -- the information you can find there is much more compelling than the description on the App Store or with their demo version, which gives scant information.
I experimented for a little while with "Echolon" by Guenter Geiger, which is also the scene provided with the demo version of RjDj. After playing around with it for a while with claps and hums I was left a little disappointed, feeling that the recording sounds were just being relayed back to me in slightly distorted echoes.
However, I then tried "Gridwalker" by F. Barknecht, and was extremely impressed. This was a scene that took the noises around you and truly made it into something that seemed like music. This is the scene that they should have provided with the demo version; it's extremely impressive and also fun to use. It also simply sounds great.
In future, the developers say they will add more free scenes to the app, as well as the ability to buy extra scenes as separate downloads within the app.
This has strong potential to be a very successful app -- for the layman as well as the experimental musician -- and certainly starts to nudge the iPhone a little further into the arts realm.