OscilloScoop Turns Music Into A Game

Independent developers Scott Snibbe and Lukas Girling has announced the release of a new app for iPhone and iPad that turns music into a form of interactive game. The app, playfully called OscilloScoop, presents a trio of brightly colored stacked spinning crowns. Touching a crown trims or builds up its edge, like a spinning disk of clay. As you carve into this disc, the music changes, and you effortlessly produce hip hop, techno, electro, and other recognizable forms of music. The process is much like a DJ spinning records, but you create original music of your own, rather than merely cutting between tracks.

The designer of the app, Lukas Girling, says, "The aim of OscilloScoop is to devise something extremely immediate, to take away the involved, complex, technical process of creating electronic music with professional software. It's literally as easy as turning a volume dial, but instead of just making music louder or softer, you are able to create endless variations of the music itself, within recognizable electronic music genres."

Girling's partner in the app, programmer and artist Scott Snibbe, says, "We're taking the same techniques game players use in real-time play and applying them to real-time creation of music."


Snibbe and Girling have dreamt of releasing such a "musical game" to the public since they met in the 1990s at Interval Research. They had a chance to work together there on musical research, and to collaborate with some of the world's top musicians and music pioneers including Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson, and even Max Mathews, the inventor of digital audio, famous for creating the first singing synthesizer memorialized in the last utterances of the computer H.A.L. in 2001.

To a trained musician, OscilloScoop can be broken down into understandable musical elements. The top ring controls the melody, or choice of notes. The middle ring controls a resonant low-pass filter that immediately transports you to a dance club: the feeling of slowly sinking under water as the sounds from the party above warp and distort. And the last disc fades the melody in and out over the beat. Beats can be chosen in several genres from Hip Hop to Electro, Techno, and House by touching polygons on the right-hand side of the screen. Six beats come with the app and twenty more are available for an inexpensive $1.99 in-app purchase.

Pricing and Availability:
OscilloScoop 1.0 is only $0.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Music category.

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