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!
