Ocarina of Meme: iPhone Plays Zelda by Blowing
Sick of hearing about music apps for the iPhone?
This is going to make you feel much worse. In fact, you might just want to go somewhere else right now.
Okay, before you start throwing your cell phones at me, they are experimenting with some nice ideas:
- Tilt
- “Wind input” using the mic
- Finger placement over multi-touch holes on the device
Breath controllers haven’t gotten the play recently they once did. What this demonstrates is that you can use a mic input to fake it – though they don’t make that input variable; that is, you can’t blow harder or lighter to get different results. (In fairness, that doesn’t work quite as well with a mic, at least not without some effort.) So there’s plenty here to experiment with – and nothing stopping you from, say, using the internal mic on your laptop to play around.
Whether or not it’s a serious musical instrument, as a toy it’s a bit like a 21st Century kazoo. There’s even online sharing of songs. So I can’t knock it as a toy. I’d just like to see someone make a DIY breath controller – any ideas? (Musical breathalyzer?)
The software is $0.99. I’ll be they sell a whole bunch of them. But if you do a Zelda cover, dress up in the green suit – it helps the effect. [iTunes link]
Also on Synthtopia, who grabbed this first.
17 Comments
Leave a Commentsilicon/silicium
In europe, Thomann also released a simple usb to xlr adapter for less than 50$ (38€ in fact).
just look at
November 7, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
silicon/silicium
hmmmm, problem inserting link :/
http://www.thomann.de/fr/the_tbone_micplug_usb.htm
November 7, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
Joel Falconer
Not available in the Australian store yet, unfortunately — looks like a few minutes of fun at the least.
November 7, 2008 @ 7:35 pm
richardl
A couple of additional notes:
It’s networked. You can hear and locate other Ocarina players around the world playing their Ocarina apps.
Also Ocarina is iPhone only. It can’t be loaded on to an iPod Touch (even the 2nd Gen with a Mic).
November 7, 2008 @ 8:12 pm
wuruwuru
In fairness, ocarinas don’t really have much response in the way of breath sensitivity anyway.
November 7, 2008 @ 8:40 pm
Warren
Wow, this is pretty badass. I like their version of Stairway to Heaven.
November 7, 2008 @ 11:23 pm
joe
Zelda!!!
November 8, 2008 @ 7:09 am
Ogrim
Haha, funny! :D I love Zelda. I have the triforce on my hat! Woo
November 9, 2008 @ 3:18 pm
Mix
Novel idea, which makes you look a bit of a tool, blowing hot air up your iPhones dodar.
November 9, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
ml
it does in fact react on the strength of your blowing.
November 9, 2008 @ 10:37 pm
links for 2008-11-10 at Pixelblog
[...] Create Digital Music » Ocarina of Meme: iPhone Plays Zelda by Blowing Genius! They deserve every penny. Turn your iPhone into an instrument. (tags: iPhone instrument) [...]
November 10, 2008 @ 10:03 pm
Axel
It’s worth noting that the app is based on the ChucK audio programming language. The company behind the app was founded by ChucK’s creator Ge Wang.
November 11, 2008 @ 7:37 am
RichardL
Ocarina is currently the top paid iPhone app on iTunes. That’s impressive.
November 11, 2008 @ 11:46 pm
JohnG
I don’t see anywhere that says that it uses Chuck, where did you get that from?
November 12, 2008 @ 4:50 am
Axel
From the application logs folder on a jailbroken phone :
[2008.11.12 13:31:31.119] starting chuck…
[2008.11.12 13:31:38.676] buffer duration – preferred: 0.016000 : actual: 0.016000
[2008.11.12 13:31:38.815] sample rate – preferred: 16000.000000 : actual: 16000.000000
[2008.11.12 13:31:38.931] route is ‘SpeakerAndMicrophone’
[2008.11.12 13:31:39.024] hardware sample rate of 16000.000000 (iPhone 3G) detected
[2008.11.12 13:31:39.116] route = ‘SpeakerAndMicrophone’ : output gain = 1.000000 : input gain = 1.250000
[2008.11.12 13:31:40.180] chuck ready…
November 12, 2008 @ 1:29 pm
JohnG
Ah, interesting. This comes back to the question of how they can get this into the app store, as a chuck script is interpreted. Unless they have changed it so everything is hardcoded in.
Also strange that they are not advertising the fact that they are using Chuck…
November 13, 2008 @ 4:00 am
Patrick
great work Ge. I’ve been having some fun with ChucK ever since ISMIR. cheers,
Patrick.
November 15, 2008 @ 2:10 am
Leave a comment
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI