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Who needs musical ideas if you've got an iPod? (© Image courtesy of Apple)

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Music creation apps for the iPhone and iPod touch are now common, but can you create a song using just an Apple music player and its factory software? Impossible, you might think, but a blogger by the name of howsthatsound has worked it out.

Synthtopia reports that he’s crafted a track (called, appropriately enough, iPod Improv) that was created simply by chopping up bits of audio, filing them in a playlist and then letting these fragments play in a random order on his iPod.

There were three main sound sources, which the artist says were as follows: “The ambience and chatter preceding a musical performance I recently recorded; the sounds of my dogs wrestling, which I fed through noise removal software; the sounds of an overtone sax thing I made”. Four minutes of total silence were thrown in, too.

The resulting track is decidedly avant garde, but it’s undeniably a composition of sorts (though probably not one that you’d play at your wedding reception). It’s the method that’s of real interest, though – will other artists consider composing/remixing in this way, we wonder?

By Ben Rogerson