As well as these, there are more or less serious applications for musicians: Dozens of apps try their hand at being a digital piano, guitar, drums or ocarina. There are apps for writing or composing music, for multitrack recording as in a sound studio, exchanging composed music on the Net, learning to play or tuning instruments, producing drum loops or keeping in time with the beat with a digital metronome. Some apps of recent years enable musical experiments with the new interactive medium. For instance, RjDj mixes recorded voices, music or ambient sounds with musical fragments and thus creates individual compositions. 24 Hours: The Starck Mix, composed for the French designer Philippe Starck, was the early experiment of a round-the-clock soundtrack that always starts playing at the point corresponding to the time of the user, and also makes it possible to scroll in the past or future.

With Bloom, the former Roxy Music musician Brian Eno, together with musician and software designer Peter Chilvers, created an app back in 2006 that is already considered a “classic app” today. It can be used to generate, either on a random basis or self-made, meditative compositions. It links sound and image properties according to the medium and visualizes the sounds with colored dots that appear on the iPhone screen as colorful raindrops and make even small children hover excitedly over the device. The apps Trope and Air, also designed by Eno and Chilvers, build on the success of this idea, generating atmospheric sounds intuitively on the screen and linking them with graphically complex visual compositions.

With the right app, this cell phone is transformed into a sound device for any occasion – from musical instrument through synthesizer, drum computer and beat box to something that simply makes a great din. The iPhone is the travel guitar of our time, which we carry around with us and where the quality of the sound is generally not half as important as its being on hand. It has collections of sounds at its disposal that until now not a soul had at home or even needed, for that matter. It proves that in the age of digital reproducibility, sounds still exercise a huge fascination over us: Anyone who generates sounds – in whatever form – draws attention to themselves and, ideally, shows presence and significance. And those who get worked up about people whose presence is too obvious on their next trip to the park can easily hit back with the right app on their cell phone, for instance, with loud digital birds chirping and crickets chirring, thundering waves breaking, the sound of thunderstorms and menacing forest sounds that make it clear that here, nature actually has acoustic superiority. If that doesn’t help, a decibel app first lets you test whether the noise is worth getting a fine for. For those who have to sigh and give up at this point, at least there are music identification programs like Shazam that tell you the name of the song you were subjected to and download it so that you can listen to it on the subway on your way home. At top volume of course. We don’t want to leave all the others out.

Markus Frenzl