Balancing Act: Depiction of artist Bill Fontana’s Sonic Shadows installation in the bridge at the SFMOMA

In a recent one of its Artcasts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art interviewed sound installation artist Bill Fontana about the alchemy inherent in his work, and in particular the beauty of mechanical sound (MP3).

He discusses his use of the accelerometer in his piece “Sonic Shadows,” which he describes as a “kinetic acoustic wall drawing.” (There’s also an M4A version of the podcast, which includes embedded images.) The above photo is a still from a massive (114 MB) video document of the installation, available for download (MOV), and showing the set-up from a variety of angles. It opens with the question “What ambient sound does the museum generate?”

“Sonic Shadows” was commissioned by SFMOMA as part of its 75th anniversary. As the museum describes the piece: “This sound sculpture uses moving ultrasonic speakers and vibration sensors to transform the space below the dramatic circular skylight, surrounding the fifth-floor pedestrian bridge, into an acoustic drawing in real time. As visitors cross over the bridge, their footfalls contribute to real-time recordings of ambient sounds.”

Work such as Fontana’s seems especially appopriate for an anniversary of an institution, as it will be impressive to individuals who have spent significant periods of time in the building previously yet not been aware of this sonic aspect of the place.

A press release attributed to curator Rudolf Frieling goes into more detail:

Speakers installed in the ventilation holes above the bridge are paired with moving ultrasonic speakers below whose narrowly focused audio beams reflect off of the surrounding surfaces, creating what the artist describes as a transparent, acoustic wall drawing in which “the shapes of the architecture become sound.” As visitors cross the bridge their footsteps contribute to the live composition. Exploring the internal resonance of structural elements, the piece mixes real-time recordings of sounds produced by the bridge, the walls, and the pipes in the boiler room hidden behind the opposite wall. Whereas some of the artist’s past sound sculptures integrated recognizable sounds from nature or urban locations, this site-specific piece transforms more abstract, mechanical noises into an ever-changing dreamscape complemented by shifting patterns of sunlight and shadows. Fontana activates this transitional, non-gallery space, producing an immersive sensory experience of the museum itself.

There’s also video of Fontana working in the bowels of the museum at sfmoma.org, in which he discusses the influence on his work by Italian Futurists and their symphonies of industrial noise.

Future Present: An image of artist Bill Fontana in the boiler room of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

The piece opened on November 20, 2010, and will run through October 16, 2011. More at sfmoma.org.

More on Fontana at his website, resoundings.org.

RjDj is an iOS app that takes the sounds around you, transforms them, and then plays them back to you. The process is referred to as “reactive,” because the transformations occur in real time — i.e., they react to your (sonic) environment, as well as, in some cases, to more common iPod/iPhone/iPad techniques like touching the screen and moving the device.

RjDj is an app, but to borrow a phrase, or two, from Walt Whitman — who taught us to sing the body electric — it contains multitudes, because RjDj contains within it a growing library of “scenes,” each of which reacts to the world in a different way. When you install RjDj on your iPhone, it comes with a few scenes. Then you explore the RjDj library and select new ones. And, if you get adventurous, you can design your own scenes.

The incredibly popular Inception app, released last week, is a descendant of RjDj — it’s essentially a bespoke edition of RjDj, tailored to the sounds and aesthetic of the brain-twisting summer flick; each “dream” in Inception is, essentially, what would be a “scene” in RjDj.

Given how many RjDj scenes there are out there, with more every day, I asked the crew that develops software — at the company Reality Jockey, based in London — to recommend their favorite RjDj scenes and Inception dreams:

Michael Breidenbrücker, CEO (twitter.com/byzo):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Dimensions (by Kids on DSP). Why?: There is a part in it where the microphone input drives the synth — I like that. More Info: rjdj.me.

Favorite Inception Dream: Travelling Dream. Why?: Whatever you are traveling with becomes an instrument. The music is composed and designed for exactly that situation: travelling. There is so much to say about this piece of music you could write a book about it, but it just sounds simple and super, too, which is the reason why I won’t write a book about it. :-)

Robert Thomas, CCO, Reactive Music Producer
(twitter.com/dizzybanjo, dizzybanjo.wordpress.com):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Eargasm (by Damian Stewart) Why?: Eargasm was the first RjDj scene I heard while beta-testing it as a user in 2008. It completely blew me away. I used to listen to it for hours at a time. The sensation Damian Stewart created, of reality musically glowing — almost revealing a secret inner beauty in everything — is really special and has certainly touched a lot of people. More Info: rjdj.me.

Favorite Inception Dream: Sleep Dream Why?: I like a lot of the dreams we worked on for Inception for different reasons, but the Sleep Dream is especially fascinating because of the pervasive ways people are using it. Many people are actually going to sleep with this dream on and using it as a way to induce dreams. It’s very abstract sonically — reality is twisted into a vast intricate texture where time is reversed. It’s extremely surreal. Its also incorporates music from the movie in a very interesting way, stretching it out into huge granular soundscapes.

Martin Roth, CTO:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Echolon (by Günter Geiger) Why?: This is one of my favourite RjDj scenes, not because it is some technical tour-de-force or an artistic masterpiece, but because it is so simple and yet so addicting. Echolon is a bundled scene in the RjDj player and has become the most popular scene of all time. The basic effect is one that echoes your surroundings around you, pitching everything up and down. You hear different versions of the echo in your left and right ears. Sounds in your environment are pitched, giving the impression of a musical world. Possibly the greatest reason for the success of Echolon is that it provides a very striking effect, but that it is also relatively easy to understand. Everyone knows what an echo is, but few people seem to have had the opportunity to hear themselves or their surroundings echoed on demand. So here’s to you Echolon, the little echobox that could! More Info: rjdj.me.

Christian Haudum, Graphic Designer and Web Development (twitter.com/chaudum, christianhaudum.at):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Aware (by Florian Waldner) Why?: It’s very relaxing listening to it in the office. You get a nice spherical soundscape and you are connected to the “outside” to a very high degree. More Info: rjdj.me.

Dominik Hierner, iOS developer (twitter.com/k1n1m0d):

Favourite RjDj Scene: Replay Atlantis (by Kids on DSP ft Kirsty Hawkshaw) Why?: Atlantis throws you into the deep sea and you feel surrounded by a nice bass, relaxing melody and mermaids. This scene was like the first scene that really puts you into a complete new world. Replay Atlantis has kind of a story within it; it is an adventure, an experience rather than “just music.” And it also sounds great when the real world around you does not give the music something to react on. More Info: rjdj.me.

Joe White, Reactive Music Producer:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Seduction Part III (by Shuga) Why?: I like the idea of actively performing with someone else’s music as you listen to it. Seduction Part III has this cool r&b groove where you can add cheeky drum fills, synth lines and whooshes. It’s great to learn the interaction of the synth; after a while, you can create own your expressive melodies. More Info: rjdj.me.

Florian Stege, Intern:

Favourite RjDj Scene: Nothing on We (by Chiddy Bang) Why?: I like the groove of this hip-hop track and the way you can manipulate the beat and play with the instruments. I also like the variety of the different parts of the track. It gives you the opportunity to create a really nice, perfect individualized backing track for your vocals. More Info: rjdj.me.

More on Reality Jockey at rjdj.me. Get the RjDj app at itunes.apple.com, and the Inception app (itunes.apple.com).

And a little background on the Boing Boing piece: “Liked the Movie, Loved the App.”

Dream Machine: Four screen shots from the iOS app for the film Inception

A cursory search of this site finds almost two dozen mentions of RjDj since September 2009, most of them Twitter observations typed somewhere out in the world, where the software has taken a busker’s trumpet and turned it into a cellophane ribbon of ambient sound, or has echoed a pneumatic drill until it’s a dank minimal-techno beat. Often as not, these moments have felt filmic, bringing to mind sequences in Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, when the light technological mediation of experience was enough to make one feel just ever so slightly in the future.

The adoption of RjDj as a part of the massively popular Inception franchise is a great opportunity for reactive sound to reach a broader audience.

It’s also a useful reminder of how context is essential in adapting to new ways of thinking about, and participating in, sound (and, yes, a marketing budget and Leonardo DiCaprio‘s blue eyes do help). As of this writing, the Inception app has a four-star average rating: 36 five-star, 11 one-star, 12 in between — and at least two of those negative reviews are purely technical (Bluetooth and iPhone functionality issues). The latest version of RjDj has, by coincidence, exactly the same number of five- and one-star reviews, but far more (38) in between — and out of the 8,631 reviews that RjDj has received thus far (Apple lets you see the ratings for the latest version of an app, and for the app over the history of its iterative upgrades), it has a three-star average rating, but there are more one-star reviews (2,187) than there are any of the other stars (five-star comes in a close second, at 2,160).

Sound, it’s worth noting, was an essential part of the structure of Inception. The film signaled a shift between dream levels by using an orchestration of a maudlin Édith Piaf pop song heard elsewhere in the film, slowed down almost beyond recognition (see: “On the Sudden Popularity of Glacial Sound”).

Anyhow, the full BoingBoing.net piece: “Music Apps Killed the MP3 Star.”

PS: I also realize that somehow I’ve managed to write two times in as many days about things that resolve back to the prog rock band Yes. In the Boing Boing piece on Inception, I reference Zimmer’s association with the band the Buggles, which was founded by two people who worked with Yes (Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes), and the day prior I interviewed the Bad Plus, who covered Yes’ “Long Distance Runaround” on its 2008 album, For All I Care.

Following up on the Chris (Cabaret Voltaire) Watson South Pole entry earlier this week (disquiet.com), here’s streaming audio from below the Antarctic ice: “Providing an acoustic live stream of the Antarctic underwater soundscape is a formidable challange. (sic) … Underwater sound is recorded by means of two hydrophones by PALAOA, an autonomous, wind and solar powered observatory located on the Ekström ice shelf”: awi.de/en/research.

A visual interface collecting numerous radio stations from around the world that stream their signals, from ABC Classic FM 93.9 on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific to Africa No.1 106.7 in Yaounde, Cameroon: bcdef.org/antenna (via appscout.com):

Forget the “Funky Drummer” sample and the “Amen break.” Check out the folk music that Béla Bartók used as compositional launching points: “The composer’s vast archive of Hungarian folk music has been digitized,” writes The Rest Is Noise author Alex Ross, and a fair number of his phonographic recordings have been uploaded in MP3 format”: db.zti.hu (via newyorker.com).

Oddly old-fogyish comment from Geoff Dyer in his New York Times review (nytimes.com) of Don DeLillo‘s new novel, Point Omega: “This prologue and epilogue make up a phenomenological essay on one of the rare artworks of recent times to merit the prefix ‘conceptual.’” Which begs this question: “Rare”? The subject of his comment, and of DeLillo’s book, is “24 Hour Psycho” by Douglas Gordon, who has produced a vast body of work that employs similar approaches to retooling existing familiar film — an approach that is, while often humorous and sometimes revelatory in Gordon’s hands, a fairly common approach in video art, and needless to say an even more familiar approach in remix- and appropriation-friendly contemporary music (witness the 24-hour rendition by Leif Inge of Beethoven‘s 9th Symphony, aka “9 Beet Stretch”: park.nl).

Cory Arcangel, Sam Durant, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto), and Pipilotti Rist are among the artists participating in this project of using the Frank Lloyd Wright‘s interior design of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan to their own ends. The show Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum will allow them, and many others, to “imagine their dream interventions in the space for the exhibition.” Also part of the show is Hypermusic: Ascension, a March 11 rotunda collaboration by Harvard physicist Lisa Randall, Spanish composer Hèctor Parra, and artist Matthew Ritchie (guggenheim.org).

Documentary coming this summer on industrial-rock band Ministry, titled Fix: fixtheministrymovie.com. (It doesn’t appear to be listed in the IMDB.com database yet.)

An album of music made on the Monome, created to raise funds for Haiti (einpuls.bandcamp.com).

Review of Kenneth Kirschner‘s album Filaments & Voids, for which I wrote the liner notes, alongside Radu Malfatti‘s Wechseljahre einer Hyäne. The author suggests, quite rightly, that the “the importance of silence can easily be overstated here”: tokafi.com.

New blog from the prolific creator of Palm Sounds: mobilemusicmarketing.blogspot.com (via the-palm-sound.blogspot.com).

A lot of coverage coming out of New York on the Unsound festival, including this review of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio: “Their shared improvisation only hinted at the dance floor. It was sci-fi ambient music, with a background wash of pink noise like interstellar dust and puffy tones, pitched and unpitched, arising out of the static”: nytimes.com. (Previous Unsound overview: nytimes.com. More recent coverage of Andy Warhol footage set to music: nytimes.com.)

Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon reflects from a very personal perspective on his return to his native Miami for a concert of his work, as part of the New York Times’s blog (opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com). … Another Bang on a Can associate, composer Peter Wise, has posted streaming audio for a project at MASS MoCA (muziboo.com, via blog.massmoca.org).

First podcast from the creators of RjDj: more.rjdj.me. … A petition that Apple allow audio-file sharing for music apps. I strongly support this initiative: petitionspot.com.

Art critic Joseph Masheck on an exhibit at Minus Space in Brooklyn (minusspace.com) of Josef Albers‘s album covers for the old Command Records label. The exhibit ran through the end of January: “Albers was doing a job, and took it seriously.” (brooklynrail.org, via tommoody.us). I’m not sure Masheck does justice to how well the geometry and implied motion of the Albers covers reflect the ecstatic stereoscopic experimentation (by lite-music star Enoch Light) contained on the records they adorn.

The Lifehacker.com website has been including background sounds as part of its ongoing attention to improving work productivity, including recent posts on whether its readers “use ambient sounds to concentrate” (lifehacker.com) and a Mac-only piece of software titled Ommwriter that combines a blank writing space and ambient noise (lifehacker.com).

The netlabel astorbell.com/remix has set a May 1, 2010, deadline for its open-source remix project.

I’ve finally got proper vimeo.com/disquiet and youtube.com/mwd1 channels going, with “favorited” recommendations popping up on a regular basis. Twitter, as always, is at twitter.com/disquiet. More social-network coordinates at disquiet.com/faq.

● Why Brian Eno‘s score to Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones is reportedly not eligible for an Oscar (thewrap.com, via moviescoremagazine.com).

● Thanks to Google Translate, an interview with composer Cliff Martinez (commeaucinema.com).

● Great list of movie scores to look forward to in 2010, including Howard Shore‘s Edge of Darkness, Daft Punk‘s Tron Legacy (which we’ve been hearing about for so long you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s already come and gone), and Elliot Goldenthal‘s The Tempest (moviescoremagazine.com).

● Promising development for gadget and software hackers: French court “dismissed a lawsuit filed by Nintendo over the use of flash carts on the DS” (engadget.com).

● Software that emulates vintage 1950s music synthesizers (synthtopia.com, via contemplation.archipel.cc).

● Tom Moody continues the discussion about the proliferation of music apps, referencing something I’d noted about user-interface challenges in casual-gaming applications (tommoody.us, re: disquiet.com).

● Instructions on how to bend an existing RjDj scene to your wills (makezine.com), plus a fun video explaining the RjDj iPhone/Touch software, a great bit of propaganda if you want to introduce people to it (the-palm-sound.blogspot.com). Though before you get too excited at the prospect, note that the instructions look like this:

● On February 2, be sure to check out jasonsloan.com/1444, Jason Sloan‘s Cageian, day-long composition.

● William Gurstelle introduces the Atlantic‘s audience to the Arduino, the DIY artist’s “physical computer” of choice (theatlantic.com); also from the Atlantic (same issue), how composer David Dunn and colleagues might fighting insect infestation (theatlantic.com).

● Video footage of the Orchestrion, backing automaton music machine on what is certainly the Pat Metheny album I’ve looked forward to more than any other in (yow) a quarter century — that is, since his 1985 collaboration with Ornette Coleman, Song X (createdigitalmusic.com).

● Sneak peek at the upcoming Autechre album, Oversteps, due out March 22 (package design by Designer Republic). Definitely the most visually striking Autechre album since their Hafler Trio collaboration, æ³o & h³æ (bleep.com).

● Cool little USB hub that looks like a tape cassette (gizmodo.com):

● “How has the Internet changed the way you think?” Among those to offer answers to the World Question 2009: Tony Conrad, Olafur Eliasson, Brian Eno, and Ai Weiei (edge.org).

● Nortec Collective‘s Bostich and Fussible on teaming with an orchestra (latimes.com).

● Keen visual of the “Visual History of Loudness” (mediateletipos.net):

● The magazine Vice reports that dismissing the skill required to DJ brought in more negative comments than just about anything else it’s ever published (viceland.com).

● Growing database of who’s sampled whom: whosampled.com.

● The Significant Objects project (in which mundane items are given meaning and, hence, value through storytelling) focuses its narratives on a music box (significantobjects.com) — speaking of which, really pleased to see two Disquiet Downstream entries made Significant Objects cofounder Rob Walker‘s list of songs he listened to most this year (murketing.com).

● Alan Rich‘s review of Terry Riley‘s In C from March 10, 1969, in New York magazine (books.google.com, via twitter.com/aworks).

● Yuki Suzuki‘s “White Noise Machine,” which calculates “the quantity of street noise and then generate the same amount of white noise” (designboom.com).

● A documentary I want to see badly, Trimpin: The Sound of Invention, by Peter Esmonde: trimpinmovie.com.

● The plusses and minuses of music in galleries and museums: “‘Am I alone in finding the word “soundscape” mildly terrifying?’ asked one critic” (entertainment.timesonline.co.uk).

“Musical technology is so ever-present in our culture, and we are all so very aware of it, that techno-clichés and techno-banalities are never far away and have become ever more difficult to identify and root out. It is deceptively challenging these days to apply technology to music in ways that explode our imaginations, deepen our personal insights, shake us out of boring routine and accepted belief, and pull us ever closer to one another.”

And yet, as is so often the case online, the comments are riddled with enmity. One commenter writes, in full,

“One more marketing guru talking about ‘The Future Of Music’. What’s the name of his iPhone application we must buy to be considered cool hipsters?”

Another:

“This man is obviously desperate for big-figure grants.”

The culture war isn’t an entirely contemporary affair, either; writes a third,

“As far as music technology and pop music is concerned, you can directly trace the collapse of songwriting to the explosion of studio technology in the ’70′s.”

Another commenter goes all ad hominem, attacking not Machover’s ideas or his expression of those ideas, but his

“unbridled egotism and hubris.”

While the comments (55 as of this writing) aren’t necessary reading — nor are all of them negative — they do lend context to Machover’s article. Even for all the populist success of his efforts over recent decades — as he notes, Guitar Hero and Rock Band resulted from ideas explored in classes he has taught — the mesh of music and technology (more broadly, of art and technology) remains a potent source of suspicion.

Full piece at nytimes.com.

For the time being, when music apps are a relatively new phenomenon, and when such iterative changes in apps are generally understood to be upgrades, this isn’t a big deal. But as time goes on, issues will arise — tension will occur between end-users and programmers. In some cases, such tension has already arisen — you just have to scan the app reviews in iTunes to read dialogs about disgruntlement following an upgrade.

This is an especially sensitive situation because app developers aren’t merely managing a user’s response to alterations to their own programs; they’re also managing a major cultural shift. Music apps are on the front line of the rapid dissolution of the distinction between cultural production and cultural consumption.

We’re entering a fourth stage in popular music, from (1) pre-rock pop’s distinction between songwriter and performer (think Elvis, the Brill Building system), to (2) rock’s emphasis on musicians writing their own material, to (3) hip-hop’s re-use of existing sonic material, to (4) the current age of audio-games, in which users experience sound by manipulating it — not just with the iPod, but also with games like Rock Band, DJ Hero, and Guitar Hero, and with the audio tools built into the Nintendo DSi, just to name a few examples. (There are similar factors at work in underground and academic music and art cultures, but the focus for me here is on mobile music-making apps, which are significant because of their popularity, because they have made populist numerous activities and approaches to creativity that were previously considered specialized, abstract, experimental, even avant-garde.)

All three apps shown below have implemented significant improvements as a result of upgrades, and each development team has done a good job of making these alterations to pre-existing interfaces in a way that minimizes confusion for users (the Gliss and DopplerPad upgrades just occurred; the Bloom upgrade dates from last year). These upgrades do, however, beg various questions:

• What happens when an upgrade involves the loss of a feature prized by a user?

• How can app developers best plan for future changes, so that an interface can allow for growth?

• What does it mean to the making of music that an app — in effect, an instrument — is not a fixed tool, but an ever-changing thing?

• Will upgrade development always follow a linear trajectory, or will various offshoots head in different directions?

• How can the iTunes Store better help users to make informed decisions about whether or not to upgrade?

These all come down to a singular question:

• What is the social contract between app users and app developers in regard to questions of continuity, transparency, and general development support?

Here are three examples of app upgrades — what those upgrades consisted of, how they played out in the app’s interface, and what they suggest about the developer’s goals and intentions:

Adding Multiple Screens in Gliss: Gliss is a relatively new music app, launched in December 2009, but quickly showing promise with its emphasis on the gestural aspects of the iPod’s touch interface. The screens below show version 1.0 (top) and 1.1 (bottom) of the main performance interface. The change is the numeral “2.” (Ignore the scraggly lines on the screen — those are the graphics associated with the way touches result in music being played in Gliss. And also ignore the fact that the fifth icon in from the left along the menu bar differs between the two images — those are simply two states of that particular control in Gliss.)

What the single numeral “2″ indicates is the major alteration from version 1.0 to 1.1, in that the program now provides what the developer calls “multiple sheets.” These “sheets” allow the user to produce different individual musical segments within a composition, and to then move between those segments. The implementation isn’t perfect (the gesture to move between sheets can result in inadvertently altering a given sheet’s composition), but the interface change suggests the programmers were planning ahead. Note that the “2″ appears in a wide space that was previously empty.

Introducing Effects in DopplerPad: When DopplerPad upgraded recently to version 2.0, it really earned its $9.99 price tag. The upgrade included the introduction of a synth editor, various effects, and the ability to edit those effects. The two shots immediately below show the main interface before (top) and after (bottom) the introduction of effects. Note that the placement of the effect button along the bottom required other buttons to decrease in size. And it threw off the symmetry of the menu bar.

This screen below shows the list of effects in DopplerPad 2.0. The empty spot is a bit inelegant, but in the culture of apps, where change is expected, the emptiness serves a purpose: it suggests a promise of new effects in the future. More immediately and practically, it also provides space for user-edited effects to be added to the interface:

And this screen below shows the DopplerPad “Tools” menu. In the previous version, this only had the “AudioCopy” and “WifiSync” buttons; the “Synths” and “Effects” buttons are new. Needless to say, there’s a lot of room on this screen for additions. One thing app developers need to balance is how much room to leave for future additions, and how much that empty space might inadvertently raise the expectations of users:

Reflecting Generational Change in Bloom: Below are the “about” screens for the two most recent versions of the Bloom app, the more recent one (on the right) quietly announcing the upgrade to 2.0 (and, for trainspotters, newly crediting the app’s icon to menu designer Brett Gilbert):

There are numerous changes not only to the Bloom software as a tool, but also to the way that tool’s interface is designed. On one screen, for example, the prominence of the Listen button, relative the Freeze and Clear buttons, has been eliminated. This isn’t a big deal for most users, but for anyone using Bloom in performance, it might require some unexpected adjustment.

Below is a shot of one big boon to Bloom 2.0: the introduction of three additional sounds (or, in Bloom lingo, “moods”), as shown on the right:

The main screen, below, marks the biggest change to the program. In what I’d argue is a major break from the Zen-like casualness of the original Bloom, version 2.0 opens with a potentially confusing variety of choices. (The in-screen advertising for two other apps, Trope and Air, also diminishes the calm of the original.) There are now three modes: Classic, Infinite, and Freestyle. The explanation for “Classic” is of no use to newcomers to Bloom, in that to understand it you need to have experienced Bloom prior to version 2.0:

The name “Classic” seems premature, given that the software isn’t even a year and a half old. It does, however, hint at the tension inherent in iterative software design for casual users, and suggests that it may become a norm that apps will include within them their previous two or three major iterations. That would reflect a certain transparency, in that it allows for hands-on comparison between versions by users, and also allows for users to transition from one version to the next at their own pace, continuing to use the familiar version while experimenting with the revised version.

Rating Ratings Systems: In the short term, one thing that might help address “interface lag” is for the iTunes Store to implement an interface alteration itself. I’d welcome ratings visualization along the lines of what Yelp.com currently does. Below is, on the left, Yelp’s customer “rating distribution” summary chart, which closely resembles the one in iTunes; iTunes actually goes a step further than Yelp, listing the number of reviews next to each distribution (i.e., DopplerPad has as of this writing 27 5-star reviews overall, out of a total of 61 reviews). On the right below, however, is something iTunes has yet to adapt, something that Yelp terms its “rating trend,” which shows how average ratings for a given business have changed over time:

To be fair, iTunes approximates the Yelp “rating trend” by allowing you to separately view ratings for the most recent version of an application, or the combined ratings of all versions of the application.

The Yelp summary above happens to be for an Indian restaurant near my home in San Francisco, and reflects the restaurant’s struggle to reclaim its once stellar reputation following the exit of its chef. But it could just as likely reflect the struggle by an app developer after an inadequate software upgrade.

There’s more information about the track, along with an MP3-download option, at rjdj.me/user/nilcjones. And there’s more about the EchoChamber scene, which was developed by Georg Bosch and employed by Jones in the production of his track, at rjdj.me. The “cover” image to the EchoChamber scene, shown to the right, displays some of the various ways that touching and tilting and shaking the iPod/Phone enacts various modes of audio manipulation. Get the full Best of RjDj 2009 compilation for free at rjdj.me as a Zip file. Note: the RjDj app is free, but some scenes require a small fee.

This is a new category for Disquiet.com, and likely a short-lived one. Not because the iPod (or, for that matter, the iPhone or iPod Touch, the latter of which is currently my primary MP3 player) is going away any time soon, but because the landscape is likely to get rangier in the very near future — as the Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and various Nokia operating systems come into their own, or at least struggle to. In the meanwhile, the iPhone/Touch has by far the best marketplace for music/sound-based applications, and to play with the best such apps on the iPod is to only get a sense of, a glimpse of, what these tools will evolve into in the years to come — especially if all these rumors of an Apple tablet result in something real. (I’ve spent a lot of time playing with music software such as Ableton Live on my small Fujitsu tablet PC running Microsoft Windows 7, and let me tell you it’s a great experience — you entirely forget you have a laptop in your hands, and the screen interface simply “becomes” the device.)

As for this list below, with one exception I left out apps that don’t make innovative or extensive use of the touch interface (or other aspects of the iPod as a gadget), and (again, with the same exception) I left out apps that are, in truth, just ports of software that’s existed on other platforms previously (hence the paucity of beatmakers and synths below).

In the case of all of the entries below that work on pre-existing audio source material (most notably Touch DJ), they would all be significantly improved if Apple’s iPod family of devices allowed for (1) easier drag-and-drop adding of music to the gadgets and (2) easy access by third-party software developers to the music held in the iTunes library.

Here they are in roughly alphabetical order:

Though some of these were first released in 2008, all saw at least one update in 2009:

1. RjDj (version 0.9.4: apple.com, appspot.com): You’ll note that RjDj is out of alphabetic order with the rest of the entries here. That’s because RjDj is far and away the most extraordinary sound application made for the iPod. It’s also a little hard to describe, because it is so new (sort of how RSS feeds and Tivo were once difficult to describe, and yet eventually became new norms of how we process information). RjDj isn’t software so much as an engine for software — numerous “scenes” have been programmed that are then played within RjDj. Those scenes allow the listener to then listen to generative and reactive music, the best of which actually process the sounds around you in real time. For all the dozens of RjDj scenes with which I’ve experimented (some free, some at a minor expense), my favorite remains one of the free ones that comes with RjDj, called Echolon. In Echolon, every sound that your mic picks up is then echoed around you — left, right, top of head, over and over, as it slowly fades in volume. The experience is exhilarating. There are weeks when almost all of my iPod use is simply playing RjDj, and much of that time is spent in Echolon. William Gibson once wrote, “The Walkman changed the way we understand cities”; well, RjDj has literally changed the way that I walk through the city — I walk toward potential sound sources, such as street musicians and construction sites, on a regular basis (and in a manner that is increasingly subconscious).

2. Bebot (version 1.5: apple.com, appspot.com): Bebot is a cute little multi-touch synth that has found use in live performance by numerous laptop-wielding musicians. In its simplicity, it bears a certain resemblance to near-phenomena, such as Leaf Trombone and Ocarina, both of which have introduced casual (casual perhaps to the point of rote) music-making to a broad audience, and is a strong suggestion that super-simple individualized instruments have a future in a music-tool marketplace increasingly defined by feature-packed apps.

3. Bloom (version 2.01: apple.com, appspot.com) and (jumping ahead alphabetically for the moment) 4. Trope (version 1.0.1: apple.com, appspot.com): Bloom and Trope are two apps developed by ambient godfather Brian Eno and his development partner Peter Chilvers. They’re generative apps that emit ambient tones based on some touch input and scene-setting decision-making on the part of the listener. They’re best thought of less as music applications unto themselves than as Brian Eno music albums released in a manner that allows for some user participation.

5. DopplerPad (version 1.6: apple.com, appspot.com): This is a somewhat complex but highly rewarding loop-based music maker that includes the ability to employ in your performances samples recorded with the iPod, and it involves excellent touch controls.

6. Gliss (version 1.0: apple.com, appspot.com): Gliss is a brand new, and very simple, gestural music-maker. It was released on December 23, and I was immediately taken by its use of drawing on the screen (in addition to the tilt function) to manipulate sound.

7. JR Hexatone (version 1.1: apple.com, appspot.com): A highly original implementation of a beat-oriented music-maker, with an interface so packed with iconographic tools and settings that it’s just dying to be ported to tablet form. (This app makes an interesting study in contrast with the two Brian Eno apps listed above. All three were developed by musicians associated with prog rock — JR Hexatone with Jordan Rudess of the band Dream Theater, whose music I have never enjoyed, but this app is engrossing.)

8. SoundGrid (version 2.0: apple.com, appspot.com): There are a lot of grid-based casual music-making tools on iTunes. It’s quite likely that I haven’t tried them all, but of the ones that I have, SoundGrid is the best — the best internal sounds, the best mix of effects, the best use of touch gestures, and the best approach to multiphonic voicing.

9. SunVox (version 1.4.5: apple.com, appspot.com): On the face of it, SunVox shouldn’t really be on this list. It’s a very complex synthesizer that doesn’t make much of the iPod’s touch interface. However, that complexity comes with purpose — SunVox is fully functional (and while I try not to take price into consideration, it’s also a quarter the price of vaguely similar offerings in the iPhone store, and that’s hard to ignore). And the utilitarian interface also has a purpose: the software’s creator is making SunVox available on numerous OSs, including Windows, Linux, Windows Mobile, and PalmOS — and thus it also deserves extra points for not treating the iTunes Music Store as a walled kingdom.

10. Touch DJ (version 1.0: apple.com, appspot.com): Touch DJ is one of many tools for the iPod that emulate the experience of working two sounds together, whether those sounds were sourced on vinyl or on CD or as digital files. What distinguishes it from the iTunes Music Store competition isn’t just that it’s fully functional (a lot of scratch apps on the iPod are little more than vinyl-emulating sound-effects generators, and a lot of the DJ apps are bare-bones implementations with little sign of intended improvement). What distinguishes it is how it uses visual cues as part of the DJing process — spikes in the sound waves of samples signal that a beat is occurring. (A close second in this DJ caterory is Sonorasaurus, which I’m looking forward to watching develop.)

The Disquiet.com “Best of 2009″ was published as three separate lists. The other two parts are:

Part 2: Best of 2009: Free “Netreleases”