Following in the ambient footsteps of Eno’s inaugural iPhone app, Bloom, comes RjDj. Developed by Reality Jockey, an Austrian dev outfit, they describe RjDj as, “the next generation of walkman or mp3 player… a digital drug which causes mind twisting hearing sensation.”

Wrapped up as a cute little iPhone toybox, RjDj is actually a platform for Reactive Sound Art. The “reactive” bit means that the app responds to sensory input. In the case of RjDj, this could find you jiggling, touching, tilting, shouting, murmuring, wiggling and generally seeking out all sorts of noises to generate entirely strange sonic experiences.

The app is split in to several different ‘scenes’, which are in essence very simple iPhone apps, providing different ways to create and interact with a selection of bold new soundscapes. Each scene handles your input in a different way; for example, Gridwalker plays an evolving, twinkling 8-bit melody, depending on how loud or quiet your environment is, while WorldQuantizer grabs noises and recycles them in to an organic rhythmic groove. There’s also a record function enabling you to hang on to your favorite RjDj sessions for future listening.

A typical Pure Data patch

Most exciting for burgeoning coders is the opportunity to create and submit your own scenes to be featured in future RjDj releases. The scenes are coded in an open source programming environment called Pure Data (PD). The really special thing about PD is that, unlike traditional text-based coding, it’s a visual modular language, meaning that creating a scene is somewhat like building a fairly complicated Lego model out of very sophisticated bricks. To the beginner it would take practice, but it’s certainly achievable (and a fun starting point leading to more advanced coding). If PD tickles your creative fancy, you can download it for free, right now.

With RjDj, you really get out of it what you put in — the packaged scenes seem to be most effective wandering around a city and hearing different sounds swirl about your ears, re-jigged by this smart little app.  Effectively, RjDj is something incredibly clever masquearading as a bit of fun. And while it is indeed bags and bags of fun, if Reality Jockey develop the concept carefully, RjDj will become an effective sub-platform for distributing some of the most exciting experiences available on the iPhone.

Two versions of the app are available for download now: RjDj Single (free) and RjDj Album ($2.99), the latter of which features six different ‘scenes’ while the former is a one scene freebie.

Reality Jockey’s iPhone app certainly makes for weird listening, if you do download it leave a comment below describing your RjDj experiences.

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Seemingly not content with having fathered an entire musical genre, pioneered generative music, produced U2′s Where The Streets Have No Name, collaborated with Bowie and generally rubbed-shoulders with a raft of modern music legends, Brian Eno has now released his first iPhone app dubbed Bloom ($3.99).

Developed by Peter Chilvers, in collaboration with Eno, the app is described as, “Part instrument, part composition and part artwork…” The idea is that anybody can play with Bloom and coax gentle melodies and ambient soundscapes out of their iPhone.  Having downloaded the app, plugged a pair of speakers in to my iPhone and cranked up the volume, it took only a few moments to compose an authentic ambient piece that sounded like a convincing out-take from Eno’s Music for Airports.  It works and it is a joy to toy with.

Being a sound-based app, the screenshots on the store do it absolutely no justice, Bloom ends up looking somewhat staid.  It’s in hearing Bloom and experiencing the ambience that it creates, that you truly understand how magical it is.  According to the App Store product page, “… Bloom’s innovative controls allow anyone to create elaborate patterns and unique melodies by simply tapping the screen.”  Setting aside the marketing spiel, Bloom is utterly unique — a truly enchanting experience, like nothing else I have experienced on the iPhone, this is an app that will make you smile.

Those familiar with Eno will have seen this app coming a mile off — he’s always been keen to exploit the latest technologies and platforms for his artworks, all the way back to creating Mac-compatible Media Art distributed on CD-ROMs. These days there are several Eno-inspired tools and toys available on Apple platforms.

Arty folk with a bit of a creative block may want to check out Oblique Strategies. Originally developed by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt as a deck of cards, each card features obtuse, odd and frequently stimulating tidbits of advice to re-energise the flow of creative juices; favorites include, “Not building a wall, making a brick,” and, “Move towards the unimportant.” The virtual Oblique Strategies decks are available both in widget flavor and iPhone/touch app flavor, for free.

Back on the desktop, TAB readers inspired by the ambient experiences offered in Bloom should investigate the joys of generative music a little further. For his seminal ambient album Generative Music 1, Eno made use of a piece of software called Koan to generate the album. With Koan, you’re able to feed the software a few basic variables and values and it’ll pumps out a piece of unique music at the other end.  The software has long since evolved and is now superseded by Noatikl, available for OS X.

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