iPod composes track

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

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

Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.