02.09.12
Steve Jobs Meat Blob
Worth ten people sniffing hexane, at least.
For your consideration also — the great bounty of iPhone orchestra video.
There’s never any shortage of hand-clapping and delight for taking an old cheap wind instrument, made to be played by hand, and rejiggering it into a software emulation that’s not quite as good but lots easier, for the iPhone. Even the cigar box guitar isn’t immune to being screwed up.
The top app orchestra in the list at YouTube is from Stanford University. And I stole a bit of it for Steve Jobs & Meat Blobs. The hopeless nerds in black body-stockings, not even particularly good as imitations of Dieter from Sprockets, were too priceless to pass up.
If you hang around until the end of the Stanford video you’ll find one of the iPhone mavens has made an ocarina for it. One that also tells you when other people around the world are playing their fake iPhone ocarinas, too.
Now if you wanted to be famous for dressing in black stockings while playing the ocarina, the New York Times would probably tell you to piss up a rope.
But if you’re from Stanford and you’re sticking an iPhone in your mouth or tapping on it with your fingers, it’s another matter entirely.
“If you have open ears and open minds, you see the value,” says one of the iPhone ocarina players.
“Somebody said it was revolutionary,” remarks another. Somebody said, surely.
iPhones nudge people into being creative, expressive.
Ultimately, these all fail for me because they lack any real physical resonant structure that along with a person, makes a wind, string or percussion instrument. You can beat a guitar and it will very much contribute to the music you make. iPhones? C’mon.