Bloom: Brian Eno's ambient music app for iPhone

by Jay Hathaway Oct 9th 2008

Brian Eno is one of my favorite composers, so I was thrilled to hear that he was releasing a new composition tool for the iPhone. It's called Bloom, and it lets you generate, play and visualize ambient music. It's hard to explain how this works, but you basically tap the screen in different places to generate sounds. The sounds you play repeat periodically to form a composition. Because the notes are all on different cycles, the sound evolves as you let it play.

If it gets boring, you can shake the screen to clear what you have, or tap anywhere to add more sounds. If you don't feel like making anything up, there's also a "listen" mode, and once you have something you like, you can freeze it to keep new notes from being introduced. Each sound pops up as a dot on the screen, and Bloom can be mesmerizing to watch as a visualizer. I hooked my iPod up to a dock and some speakers, and let it run as a little art installation on my desk. That's pretty good for 4 bucks!

Tags: app-store, bloom, brian eno, BrianEno, composition, generative music, GenerativeMusic, iphone, iphone apps, IphoneApps, music, visualizer

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Matt said 11:24AM on 10-09-2008

Brian Eno also released a similar desktop application called "77 Million Paintings" which generates images as it generates music. I have it installed and while I don't use it much it is great for killing the time it takes me to fall asleep on long train or plane trips.

Jash Sayani said 12:05PM on 10-09-2008

4 bucks!!! I'll wait for weekend offers......

Philip Dhingra said 5:28AM on 10-10-2008

Definitely more expensive than your traditional ambience app for the iPhone, but it comes with the Brian Eno label, and therefore I jumped on it immediately.

And it's awesome.

ARYA IZADI said 4:36PM on 2-06-2009

HOW CAN LISTEN TO RADIO WITH MOBIL PHONE FROM ENTERNET ? THANKYOU.

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