Originally posted at the Dubspot Blog.

I saw this recently over at Peter Kirn’s Create Digital Music blog. I just watched the video below and read the interview Peter did (link below) and I was very inspired by what I saw of Soundprism. I would definitely like to give it a try once it get’s through Apple’s strange and opaque app store approval process. It’s been submitted already and hopefully will be approved soon. Basically it’s a way to visually organize tones that’s not a keyboard, set up based on the circle of thirds making it intuitive and easy for you to play musical patterns that sound ‘correct’ on the iPad’s touch screen. Check out the demo (4:39):

Adding a MIDI or OSC output to this is an obvious next step which would make it terrifically useful. They say that they’re working on MIDI out but with no promised date. In the meantime it might be fun to record this, sample the audio and mangle or process it. I could definitely see using it to create some interesting melodic and harmonic raw material to work with. As a no-keyboard-skills-having musician I am always excited by ways to compose new original stuff that don’t relying on intense keyboard skills.

In this quote from Peter’s interview with Sebastian Dittman of Audanika, the company who make the software, Dittman says this:

The reason we are able to actually use these concepts now is that we finally have interfaces that can change visually and aren’t static. I see SoundPrism as knowledge poured into a dynamic interface that enables users to just use that knowledge without having to acquire it first.

I love this idea and I think that the touch-screen as a visual, dynamic, fluid interface is actually a lot more revolutionary than we’ve all completely figured out yet. Just the possibilities opened up by something like TouchOSC and being able to create your own controller layouts was incredibly inspiring to me and lead me to get an iPad. I think as we see brilliant people like those at Audanika starting to approach these interfaces we will see some very interesting things start to come out of it. I’m excited.

Read the full interview with Audanika’s Sebastian Dittman by Peter Kirn over at Create Digital Music.

Update: it’s out on the iTunes store.