One of my favorite diversionary iPhone apps is a little number called Bloom from Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers that allows users to generate ambient musical compositions by tapping out notes on the iPhone’s screen that then get replayed in a slowly fading loop that you can add on to pretty much for infinity.
In times of stress or angst I’ve turned to it and plinked out a random melody and it has a wonderful calming effect not only in the soothing music and colors it produces, but also in getting me to focus — if even but for a few moments — away from whatever’s frustrating me at that time.
Of course true to the ephemeral nature of its on-the-fly creations, Bloom offers no way of saving and exporting whatever you’d done from the iPhone. Until now: I just figured out a way. Because I’m a bottom-rung genius like that.
The trick is it involves additional equipment:
1) Some sort of digital audio recording device — preferably one that can capture in stereo (I use a Sony Recorder – Model No. ICD-UX70)
2) A jack-to-jack wire that can connect from the headphone output of the iPhone to the mic input of the recorder.
Then it’s just a simple matter of hitting the record button on my Sony and tapping out a tune in Bloom. After that I plug the recorder into a USB port on my computer, open up the MP3 file in Quicktime and either save it in iTunes or export it as a WAV audio file, like this minute-long snippet.
Granted, it’s just a whole buncha not much, but I’m pretty pleased that I figured a work-around and for better or worse, you might be hearing some of these ditties attached to the occasional future bike commute timelapse vid.
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