“A streaming radio station and mood-based music discovery tool, Ghostly Discovery is a free app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you listen to the Ghostly International and Spectral Sound catalogs (full songs, nothing less) and share your favorites with friends.”

“Air is a generative audio-visual work created by musician/software designer Peter Chilvers and Irish vocalist Sandra O’Neil. Based on concepts developed by Brian Eno, with whom Chilvers created Bloom, Air assembles vocal and piano samples into a beautiful, still, and ever changing composition, which is always familiar, but never the same.”

Air (iTunes Link)

The algorithm I used is a bit complicated, but just in case you’re curious: since the gene is expressed as a surface protein antibodies can sense, it’s considered as a string of amino acids. Each beat corresponds to one amino acid, and the piece is in 3/4 time, so each six measures would correspond to five turns around the alpha structure.

“Swine Flu Hemagglutinin”: amino acid sequence as ambient music

I have to say, I find seeing ambient artists doing live shows to be pretty boring. I find the music to be pretty useless without some context for, well, use. I’m falling pretty hard here into one side of what an old literary theory professor of mine called the Kant/St. Augustine divide, and I think that’s fine. Maybe you have other ideas, and I think that’s fine as well.

But I’m also pretty interested in expanding the spirit of what this site has been doing for the last few years, and so I’d like to start thinking about some ways of getting the music I point to on this site out from under your headphones and out into the actual world for use. But in a way that’s a bit more indirect than promoting live shows. That’s not very interesting to me.

So consider this an invitation for artists, designers, and anyone else reading to collaborate on some kind of project that applies ambient music to the world. I really have no idea what that means, but I’d like to try to do something. If you have an interest, or ideas, or anything, leave a comment, shoot me an email at ambientmusicblog at gmail.com, or berate me via twitter.com/ambientmusic.

Brian Eno released an interesting little application for iPhones and the iPod Touch that allows users to create generative music. I haven’t played around with it yet, but it looks, at worst, like an interesting diversion.

Eno says, “Bloom is an endless music machine, a music box for the 21st century. You can play it, and you can watch it play itself.”

What else would you expect him to say?

Download Bloom (iTunes link).

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Postive Soundscapes Project