Brian Eno only recently announced the impending release of his new solo album LUX, and now the legendary sonic architect has shared another new project: his own iPad app.
Entitled Scape, it's a compositional app that allows users to create their own atmospheric pieces of "generative" music (or, like the name indicates, soundscapes). Users select from a variety of background drones, foreground elements (which can be percussive or melodic) and overall moods by choosing backgrounds and colours, then dragging shapes onto them in various combinations, meaning that you can create an awesome-sounding ambient piece without any actual music knowledge.
Making the whole thing even cooler, the foreground elements interact with one another and behave slightly differently each time they are used, meaning that every performance is sonically unique.
"I felt that what was very interesting to do as a composer was to construct some kind of system or process which did the composing for you. You'd then feed inputs into it, and it would reconfigure it and make something beyond what you had predicted," Eno told the Guardian. "I worked on things like that for a while: Music for Airports and Discreet Music were examples, but they represented were recordings of these processes in action. What I really wanted to do was to be able to sell the process to somebody, not just my output of it."
The app was created with Peter Chilvers, who helped Eno make his previous app Bloom, and is available now from the iTunes App Store. It costs $5.99. Watch an instructional video below.
As for LUX, it's out November 13 through Warp.
Entitled Scape, it's a compositional app that allows users to create their own atmospheric pieces of "generative" music (or, like the name indicates, soundscapes). Users select from a variety of background drones, foreground elements (which can be percussive or melodic) and overall moods by choosing backgrounds and colours, then dragging shapes onto them in various combinations, meaning that you can create an awesome-sounding ambient piece without any actual music knowledge.
Making the whole thing even cooler, the foreground elements interact with one another and behave slightly differently each time they are used, meaning that every performance is sonically unique.
"I felt that what was very interesting to do as a composer was to construct some kind of system or process which did the composing for you. You'd then feed inputs into it, and it would reconfigure it and make something beyond what you had predicted," Eno told the Guardian. "I worked on things like that for a while: Music for Airports and Discreet Music were examples, but they represented were recordings of these processes in action. What I really wanted to do was to be able to sell the process to somebody, not just my output of it."
The app was created with Peter Chilvers, who helped Eno make his previous app Bloom, and is available now from the iTunes App Store. It costs $5.99. Watch an instructional video below.
As for LUX, it's out November 13 through Warp.
