The idea of an audio app means different things to different people. Even to try and distinguish between “sound” and “music” apps is to propose a false distinction. Ringtones, for example, use music as sound: they turn art into something functional, an alert. Meanwhile, an app like RjDj (recently retired by its manufacturer, the British firm Reality Jockey) turned everyday sounds into music. The word “app” itself is up for grabs — many innovative mobile apps originated as experiments on the web, and the web continues to be a sketchbook space for coders; for example, check out the browser-based “drawing sound” project by Seth Sandler, one of the developers of the great NodeBeat app. Also a favorite among the i/olian crew is the Infinite Jukebox, which takes a song, breaks it into pieces, and then lets those pieces rotate in a semi-random process … conceivably forever, or at least until the universe reaches heat death.
These are just some of the things we’ve been listening to — more to the point: interacting with — while working toward our own project-development goals.
