I'm equal parts excited and jealous (that I didn't think of it) about the iPhone app RjDj, which creates beats on the fly out of the sounds coming in from the microphone. I've been trying for a while now to think of ways to incorporate live sampling into performance in a way that doesn't sound too chaotic and yet doesn't require superhuman precision, and I think this is the answer I've been searching for: let software take care of the rhythm and quantization and you can focus on the sounds you want.

Making it an iPhone app was certainly clever and seems to make for a solipsistic sort of fun, like a soundtrack to one's life, but I think this has much bigger potential for the performance of experimental music. The iPhone has a nice set of user controls between the multitouch and the accelerometer, but the microphone and headphones set up seems a bit limiting, unless maybe you could wirelessly transmit the audio output. The creators seem to have found some way to do this for their demo videos.

Their developer site seems to contain some open source goodness and possibly the seeds of being able to run this as a standalone desktop app or a plugin. I might have to try adapting it myself, or making my own version from scratch.

via Kottke