Yesterday's news might have been a bit too iPhone-centric for normal, non-tech-dork human beings, but for those of us enthralled with shiny, touchable objects, it's a format and medium we've come to love. While the iPhone and iPad are often lauded as great media consumption devices they're rarely noted for their creation potential. Luckily, Thicket manages to cover both ends.
As the above video shows off, Thicket is a reactive music creation program. It's not the first (we've already seen Brian Eno's Bloom, Bubble Harp and a few other interactive music apps) but Thicket is a bit different.
Developed by Joshua Ott and Morgan Packard, the program features two amazing facets not found in the others. First off, it supports VGA-out, which means that it can be displayed on a larger screen (e.g. a projector at a show). Although it's not quite an instrument and not quite an album, it's still an interesting and pretty-to-watch example of audio art. It's multi-touch enabled, which means the rhythm changes depending on how many fingers are on the screen and this is all stored in a sequence so it repeats indefinitely. It also changes depending on how quickly you're moving your fingers.
While this particular example is obviously geared towards and created by electronic musicians with a penchant to experiment with interactive video, it's far more interesting than the millions of band apps the Apple devices have seen so far. There's already a fair share of actual instruments in the app store, but when it comes to interactive pocket art it's still a burgeoning scene. While we can't imagine ourselves rocking out on the stage with this quite yet, it's one of many great examples of the ways musicians are utilizing the precarious devices to create something new and interesting.
