iPhone iFlute! by cogdogblog
posted 16 Nov ’08, 4.22am MST PST on flickr
Yet another day passes and its another utterly amazing iPhone app. Ocarina is a musical instrument, and you play by holding it horizontal and blowing into the microphone (indicated by yellow arrow) You then place your finders on the dots, and the combinations allow you to create music as you blow.
If you are very good, you can generate (well manually) your original music online as a score.
A Twitterbution to @courosa
Boom. Tremors. It feels like a veritable explosion of innovative ideas on how to leverage the unique (well it was unique, look at all the wanna-be clones) interface of the iPhone. (yes, it is a “closed” platform, am I hurting for apps? nahhhh) Copying a touch screen won’t be enough, IMHO.
Among the coolest features are ones tapping into the audio side of the phone- Shazam alone is amazing for identifying music, but now I have 3 different apps that turn my iPhone into a musical instrument… besides Ocarina for the wind sction, I have an electric guitar:
and a drum kit:
And I would guess there are a handful of keyboards…
So while making mainly noise with my collection, I was wishing I could use one my IPhone apps that record- iPhone Recorder or Griffin iTalk which seems not possible because you cannot run an app in the background.
At the same time, my parallel thinking circuits were wondering about something like RockBand for an iPhone, but then it all came together– it is a social thing! It’s not about me being a band alone on my home; I need to get together with my band mates, and we can each choose the instrument to play (and the geekiest one can play sound engineer and be the audio recorder). Okay, this is pretty sad for a comparison of jamming real instruments in the basement, but that will be an exercise left to the eye of the beholder.
There are probably already 5 YouTube videos of people doing this.
It might work better if you plug the output of the iPhones into some speakers, or a mixing board, or a stack of giant Marshall amps…
Update: Within an hour I had twitterbution from @intrepidteacher who shared iBand – Life is Greater than the Internet:
and there i a whole lot more at their web site http://www.iband.at/ including a great series of shots that showed their setup for the video abovr.
I wonder if I’ll be able to bring myself to blow into my iPhone’s mic? With every other kind of mic I use, blowing on it is a huge no-no and could wreck the mic. 😀
@Cheryl: You blow softly, more like breathing, and hopefully don’t project any spit or loogies 😉 Doesn’t seem any diff from talking into it.