MusicBall vs Geography

Drop in a song. Watch a machine get built to play it. MusicBall takes a piece of music and constructs a whole contraption around it — plates, curving rails, spiralling drops. Then a ball falls through the lot, and every note you hear is the ball hitting something. It's oddly hard to stop watching. EVERY SONG GETS ITS OWN MACHINE Change the song and everything changes. A gentle piece grows tall spirals the ball winds slowly down through. A fast one packs tight columns it ping-pongs between. Switch back and forth and you'll never see the same machine twice. YOU'LL START TO SEE THE MUSIC Every note has its own colour, and it keeps that colour wherever it turns up. A few minutes in and you're spotting a melody's repeats on the wall before you hear them come round again. PICK WHO PLAYS THE MELODY Hand the tune to a different part and the whole machine rebuilds around it. Or let the spotlight travel between parts as the piece goes on — the ball slides across to a new rig each time the lead changes. Or run two balls at once, side by side. EVERY HIT LANDS ON THE BEAT The ball never fakes it. It arrives exactly when the note does, every single time — so what you're watching and what you're hearing are the same thing happening. BRING YOUR OWN FAVOURITE Seven classics are built in to get you started: Canon in D, The Entertainer, Turkish March, In the Hall of the Mountain King, Für Elise, Prelude in C and Gymnopédie No. 1. After that, bring in anything you like — your file stays on your phone. FLY THE CAMERA Ride along with the ball, or take over: spin around it, pan across the machine, pinch to take in the whole thing at once. NOTHING TO SIGN UP FOR No account. No ads. No tracking, nothing collected. It works exactly the same in Airplane Mode.

Geography turns a sound into a landscape. The sample is drawn as a cross-section of the Earth, from the burning core to outer space, and every grain of sound is a particle with weight that falls, bounces and sounds according to the layer it crosses. PLAY THE MATTER • Tap the terrain to drop grains, draw strings that ring when they're hit, and tilt your iPad or iPhone to change gravity. • Eight string materials: metal, wood, glass, skin, gut, bronze, bamboo and stone. • An on-screen keyboard of up to five octaves, or a continuous ribbon for gliding pitch. • MIDI: play from your keyboard and map its knobs to the app's with MIDI learn (endless encoders too, like the Akai MPK mini's). Program Change switches sounds. A WORLD WITH A LIFE OF ITS OWN • Six strata, each with its own weather: fire in the core, earthquakes in the geosphere, plants that bloom and release tuned spores, swell and bubbles in the water, wind in the atmosphere, satellites and comets in space. • Rituals: a sequencer of world events. The Moon, in its real phase, and the planets sing too. • Life: the instrument improvises, arpeggiates or mutates the sequence on its own. SEE IT IN 3D • Flat, Ridges, Living ridges, Surface, Point cloud, Planet and Sphere: seven ways to look at the same sound, with aurora, clouds and a free camera. THE LAB • Envelope, filter, two LFOs, echo, reverb, modulation (flanger, phaser, ensemble), scales and a 16-step sequencer/arpeggiator. • A mixer with one channel per sound source in the world, and a Space tab to place each source around your head, with scenes that morph on their own. THE REAL EARTH • Pick a place on the map and its live weather flows into the sound. Earthquakes from the last 24 hours shake the landscape. SAMPLER AND PRESETS • Sampler: record with the microphone or open a file, then trim, normalize, reverse and add fades. Up to 45 seconds, which become a landscape; it exports WAV too. • Save your sound under a name, with its settings and rituals, and export it as a file to move it between devices or share it. ON IPHONE AND IPHONE DUO • On iPhone, the world in full screen and a hidden dock with the essentials: play, draw, gyroscope, Life and the Ribbon. In landscape, Rituals, Earth, the Lab and the Mixer take the whole screen, and two fingers move, zoom and rotate the view. • Made for iPhone Duo too: closed, it is the world with the essentials, to play with one hand; open, the same world, bigger, with a keyboard in the dock and the panels in the middle of the screen. FOR YOUR STUDIO • Audio Unit (AUv3) for Logic Pro, GarageBand, AUM and more: every setting can be automated and is saved with your project. Stereo output, binaural spatial audio with head tracking, or 7.1.4, plus separate stems by source or by stratum. • Thirteen synthesized factory landscapes. You can also open your own sounds, or an image, which you hear as a landscape. Try it free (5 minutes per session). A one-time purchase unlocks everything on iPhone, iPad and Mac. No subscription. No accounts, no ads, no data collected.