Music Creation for the Untalented, the Untrained, the Lazy, and Those with Some Time to Kill

I've been checking out iPhone and iPad music creation applications. Some are geared for experienced music professionals who already know their way around equipment. But I like the stuff that is intuitive and can produce results in a minute or two. I suppose you could say I was looking for the equivalent of tambourines, finger paints, bubbles, or beach volleyball. In other words, stuff that is so simple to use it is hard to screw up.

Here is some of what I have found. Some are iPhone and iPad apps; others are website-based. (I looked at more apps than I included here, but some of them weren't all that interesting or seemed to make sounds rather than music or musical tones.)

DRAWING

Sonic Wire Sculptor 2010: "The Sonic Wire Sculptor turns your 3D drawing into sound. It introduces a simple yet deep connection between visual and audio composition."

Squiggle: "Squiggle is an iPad application that allows you to draw lines on the screen which turn into stings and can be played like guitar."

Soundrop: "Soundrop is a sound toy application for iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch which allows you to create sounds by drawing lines on the screen and have ball bouncing off them. Each time the ball touches the line, a sound is generated. Depending on the location of the line on the screen, the tone of the sound is set."

gliss: "Gliss is a new sound application which lets you play sound files and mix them easily by drawing on your iPhone."

MusicDraw: Another drawing-based app. More about it here.

Artikulator: "While traditional sheet music is cryptographic for the uninitiated, Artikulator is as simple to understand as a child’s toy. A line that curves upward creates a higher-pitched sound. A line that is bigger makes a louder sound." (ADDED 5/19/10)

Singing Fingers -- Finger Paint with Sound: "While you drag your finger across the screen, your voice or any other sounds nearby are turned into colors on the musical canvas. The pitch of the sound is translated into a color, while the loudness of the sound determines the size. If you start on a blank white space you are recording. If you start on a colored space you are replaying. Use up to five fingers to play back many sounds at the same time, forwards, backwards or sideways." (ADDED 10/21/10)

Bubble Harp: "Bubble Harp draws bubbles around your fingertips, recording and replaying your movements while creating music based on the animated forms. It’s a combination of drawing, animation, music, art, geometry, and games." (ADDED 10/21/10)

Reactable mobile: This isn't a drawing tool. Rather it is a synthesizer you control by moving objects around on the screen. (ADDED 10/21/10)

TONES

Raindrop Melody Maker: This is web-based, so you can go on this site and immediately begin playing with it. It creates beautiful wind-chime-like sounds by clicking on the raindrops.

Here's the iPhone version. Dropophone (ADDED 6/16/10)

Melodica: An app that also allows you to play around with tones.

Euphonics: This application is good if you want to create piano-like songs without actually having to know how to play the piano.

rain.: "Rain. is a minimalistic audio visual composition app for the iPhone created by Rainer Kohlberger. Tap to create black sound stripes, double tap to create moire phases, shake to create a colored beat, double swipe to change background loop. The longer a stripe the lower its pitch. After creating a stripe, use your second finger to alter the length."

SoundGrid: This one is a bit more complicated. "Even if you have never composed music, you will find SoundGrid simple and exciting to play with and will start creating unique compositions in minutes with just the tips of your fingers."

Flourish: Seems to be more visually interesting than musically interesting.

ToneMatrix: "Simple sinewave synthesizer triggered by an ordinary 16step sequencer. Each triggered step causes a force on the underlaying wave-map, which makes it more cute." (ADDED 5/17/10)

Pulsate (ADDED 5/17/10)

Incredibox: This website allows you to create an online beatbox a capella group by dragging symbols of instruments, percussion, effects, chorus, voices onto online cartoon singers. (ADDED 6/4/10)

Beatwave: Allows you to create patterns, choose from three basic instruments (with others available to add), control tempo and pitch, and manipulate layers of sound. (ADDED 6/10/10)

SoundPrism (ADDED 10/21/10)

MUSIC GENERATORS

Bloom, Trope, and Air: Three different apps created by Brian Eno and/or Peter Chilvers that produce patterns and melodies. This site (not associated with Bloom) supposedly offers both a web version (though it didn't come up for me) and a downloadable PC version.

Lexikon-Sonate: Classical pieces generated by software from composer Karlheinz Essl. "Essl creates electronic and interactive music (with emphasis on algorithmic composition and generative music), and has produced numerous real-time compositions and sound instillations." You can find a downloadable program here.

WolframTones: This site generates songs based on mathematical formulas.

AMG: Ambient Music Generator: "There are no notes to play, no multitouch, no buttons to play sounds, simply shake iPhone and leave the iphone by your side to fill your space with ambient tones."

Aura Ambient Music Generator

Melody Generator: This software will generate melodies (in three forms: basic, chord-based, or scale-based) which can be edited and also saved as an audio file and in print form.

Musical Images: This is a brand new app that creates music from whatever image you plug in. There isn't anything about the application up on the web yet, but I found this at the website of the organization which created it and appears to be an earlier exploration of the concept. Lotto Lab : Music from colour

C O D E O R G A N: Plug in a URL and it generates music based on the text on that page.

Chimes: An older downloadable program that generates random sounds based on an African thumb piano and a Native American drum.

Marvim Gainsbug: This looks interesting, though I can't find place where you can enter lyrics. So it appears more of a demo of an experiment rather than a working application. "Marvim Gainsbug is a software that acts based on Twitter, implemented to compose and to play songs, with music and lyrics, in real time."

The Crooked Road: Build-A-Lyric Song Generator: This site actually produces a song for you, although the melody is set and you have a limited number of lyric options.

Synthia: It creates a song from an uploaded image. (ADDED 5/17/10.)

Sonic Charge Patternarium: This provides randomly computer generated patterns and rhythms. You can vote on each one to influence which combinations are more likely to develop in the future. (ADDED 6/10/10)

LYRICS GENERATORS

None of these generate music, just lyrics. But I anticipate that before long lyric generators and music generators will be combined so that you'll get finished songs based on the genres and subjects you select. Will any of them be great songs? Well, think of them like digital photos. You may need to produce a lot to get the right one, but you just discard those that don't work. And if you have something that almost works, you tweak it with the equivalent of a musical Photoshop.

Song Generator: Fill in the blanks and the program gives you song lyrics based on what you have written.

Love Song Generator: Another fill-in the blanks program by the same creator as above, but this one more narrowly focused on love songs.

More sites:

Country Song Generator

Country Western Song Generator

Random Pop Song Generator

Alanis Morissette Lyric Generator

And consider these for lyrics, too (there are actually far too many poetry generators in Google to list them all, but it should give you an idea of where to look if you're stuck when writing lyrics for a song):

Poem Generator

Poetry Generator

The Genuine Haiku Generator

Dada Poetry Generator

Love Poetry Generator

Another Love Poetry Generator

If you want to sound vaguely Shakespearian

Poetry Forms

Once you have found some lyrics you like, this application will create a song around them.

Songmaker for iPhone: "... simply speak the lyrics you want into the microphone while pressing the keys to enter the melody you want. After recording completed, SongMaker will play the song with your voice following the given melody along with background music." (ADDED 10/21/10)


I'm sure I have missed some good applications. So let me know about them. Again, I'm not looking for apps that require much training. This is a list for products which will allow the average not-very-musical person to create something worth listening to and perhaps sharing. I anticipate that as more products and tools are developed, the creations will become more sophisticated.

Suzanne Lainson
@slainson on Twitter

UPDATE 5/9/10
This doesn't have to do with music, but if you are going start promoting your app generated music, you might need these to help you create your web page. 55 Astonishing Online Generators for Web Designers

UPDATE 6/29/10
Here's a video where two developers demonstrate a new, easy-to-use iPad music creation tool. They also explain their motivation. And they mention finger painting.
CultureLab: The first ever iPad music performance

The Basic Tools for Community, Music, and Marketing

Your company can use music to build communities in a variety of ways:

Music as an element in your corporate personality

Some companies are doing this via sonic branding and others are incorporating music into an overall corporate image. Two examples of the latter:

Umpqua Bank has become known for its support of local musicians (e.g., compilation CDs, special play lists, live performances). In addition, the company has turned its local offices into gathering spots. According to Lani Hayward, EVP of Creative Strategies, "Our customers and other community members use our stores as community centers. Many come for entertainment and/or just to read the paper and enjoy a cup of coffee. These types of community interactions demonstrate that Umpqua is more than a just a bank." "Umpqua Bank Serves Up a Lifestyle, " Business Pundit, 6/25/08

From its inception, Scion, the youth-focused line of vehicles from Toyota, has marketed itself as a lifestyle brand. Music has been a major component. Scion Music

Music as a topic of discussion

Some companies are creating websites to foster music discussions, with an expectation that there will be cross-promotional value to them. Two examples:

H2O Audio, which makes headphones and MP3 cases for watersports, has a music discussion board on Loop'd Network, a sports site. H2Orider.com

The international mobile phone company, Vodafone, has created its own music-related site. Vodafone Music Unlimited

Music as a means of self-expression

Many music fans are no longer content to be passive consumers. They want to be part of the creative process. Two examples:

Hoobastank is encouraging fans to remix the band's latest video. Hoobastank: My Turn

Management firm Nettwerk is letting fans create albums. Said CEO Terry McBride, “We have an artist named K-OS, and we released [all pieces of his music] two weeks ago, and the fans have not heard the album. It's not due out until March, so they are actually mixing the album. So we will release physically and digitally the artist version and the fan version. And when we go to radio, we will service the artist version and fan version.” "Nettwerk CEO Terry McBride Puts Fans in Charge of Bands," MediaShift, 12/11/08

Music as a force to bring your employees together

The ad agency Weiden+Kennedy is running its own W K Radio. “The radio extension exists to inspire creativity through provocative conversations, interviews and artistic expressions relating to arts, culture, media, and music. We're starting small with minimal programming hours, with a goal to eventually share an equal amount of programming between our seven different offices and their communities worldwide.” W+K Blog, 1/05/09

Music as a theme for an event

There is a long history of companies sponsoring shows, festivals, and tours, so I won’t offer specific examples now. More to come later.

Suzanne Lainson

Community, Music, and Marketing

As a new co-contributor to this blog, I want to establish a context for my posts rather than randomly riffing on the topics of the day. I’m going to approach music within a theme: community-building. Not only do I consider it relevant, it's a subject I’ve previously written about, albeit with a somewhat different focus. A few years ago I created a blog discussing the cultural, social, and economic value of local music scenes. It was in conjunction with {noise:floor}, a Denver-based TV series created and produced by Isaac Slade (lead singer of The Fray) and his business partner Kelly Magelky. We all moved on to other activities, so the last entry was in 2007, but it is still online.

Let me start by saying that technology has given us more tools than ever before to promote community, and people are taking advantage of them.

If you are even moderately involved in Facebook, you know people are finding each other, commenting, exchanging photos, and so on. And if you are on Twitter, and particularly if you are following the social media discussions on and about Twitter, you know that leading edge marketers are looking for ways to insert themselves into social networks in some manner.

Other developments (e.g., the high cost of fuel over the summer, the economic decline which is encouraging a return to basics, the success of the Obama campaign at the grassroots level) have made us even more aware of our need for community.

Music is one of those community-building tools. It has long been used to bring people together. In tribes. In churches. At events. During wars. During protests.

According to Daniel Levitin (author of the book, Your Brain on Music):

Throughout most of our history as a species, music was a shared cultural experience. Early Homo sapiens coupled music with ritual to infuse special days with majesty and meaning. Before there was commerce, before there was anything to buy, our hunter-gatherer ancestors sat around campfire circles crafting pottery, jewelry and baskets, and they sang. Early humans didn't sit and listen to music by themselves -- music formed an inseparable part of community life. So much so, that when we sing together even today, our brains release oxytocin, a hormone that increases feelings of trust and social bonding. ("Do You Hear What I Hear?" The Wall Street Journal, 12/12/08)

Music can energize people. Calm them down. Inspire them. As Levitin notes:

Evolution selected music as an information-bearing medium precisely because it has this stick-in-your-head quality; all of us are descended from ancestors who used music to encapsulate important information.

If you haven’t considered using music as a tool to foster and enhance community, you may be missing an opportunity. According to Mary Dillon, CMO of McDonald’s, “Marketers that don't understand the power of music will simply be left behind." ("Sonic Branding Firms Get Increase in Sales Volume," Brandweek, 4/3/06)

Suzanne Lainson

Why We Love Music

Christmas (er, "The Holidays" -- apologies to my PC friends) came early this year. Five days, to be exact, when the latest issue of The Economist arrived in my mailbox, with a cover feature called Why We Love Music. Imagine my joy! I could not have orchestrated a more timely, thesis-supporting publication -- from such a respected source, no less!!



There have been a number of articles over the last year, most notably in the New York Times and The Sunday Times of London, pointing to the emerging practice of "music branding." But few have delved into the psychological, biological and anthropological drivers behind why music means something to people. Why our brains (and hearts) are hardwired to seek out music from an early age, with the average American teenager spending an eighth of their waking hours listening to it?



Many firms are jumping into the fray, using music as a selling tool -- hell even the Auto Club recently offered me a free iTunes download if I referred a friend. But very few agencies hold their clients' hand and take a step back to analyze, from a 30,000 foot perspective, how a company can authentically incorporate music into its brand. The idea of a "Chevy Music" is interesting, but without context it may come across to the consumer as a mere tactic. More cool stuff to buy, certainly, but very little in terms of a reliable resource. With longevity comes trust. The much-publicized collapse of Starbucks' music initiatives just throws gas on the fire. Consumers shake their head and move on to the next shiny bauble, while longterm questions about Starbucks' brand strategy go unanswered.

Before partnering with music, companies must ask themselves: Who is our customer and is music important to them? What values does our brand project? How does music reinforce those values? Finally, are we prepared to integrate music into our brand roadmap over the long haul?

The Economist article implies that those that do will enjoy a sustainable advantage of Darwinian strength. Companies would do well to read the article, and hopefully take away the insight that music -- and the powerful way it is hardwired to our consciousness -- is not to be applied without discipline and rigor.

The only path to using music to grow the brand asset is to understand first that it is a longterm brand strategy, not an execution to "sell more stuff."