Dreaming of a future in which music, instead of just being rendered audio files, arrives in fully generative, interactive form? Albums might “listen” to the world around you, and listeners could record their own alternate versions of music and share with others.

RjDj, the generative mobile music platform for Apple devices, realizes that future right now, instead of at some nebulous time in the future. In addition to the iPhone, you can make use of a second-generation iPod to use it. (You’ll need a headset with a mic; I have one by Griffin I’m testing.) And the RjDj folks have a whole bevy of significant updates to share:

• Free downloads (limited time): All three RjDj releases are available now for free. That includes the RjDj app itself (from which you can now grab and share releases), as well as RjDj Album (with a selection of generative/interactive/reactive releases) and the new RjDj shake.
• Download “scenes”: From the beginning, we knew that RjDj was imagined as a platform for other people to release interactive music. Now you can download scenes for free or fee. (Paid scenes currently redirect to the browser, but with iPhone SDK 3.0, you’ll be able to buy right from the app.)
• Share recordings: Because RjDj-generated music is controlled by the user and often records from the environment, the music may sound different each time. You can now share recordings with others from the device and the new social site.
• RjDj.me community: The RjDj folks have built a little community where you can share your favorite scenes and upload recordings, and keep track of scenes coming out from other artists.

The creators of interactive iPhone music app RjDj have posted a quick update on their blog answering a number of questions readers have raised here. The easiest fix: if you can’t hear RjDj’s output, you need to use the official Apple headset and mic. Tougher, but in the works: iPod touch support, and a fix for the nasty crash bug. Don’t tell us here on comments; go straight to their bug tracker and help them squash the problem. (One reader here thinks the issue may be downloading over-the-air rather than via iTunes sync.)

Some people were trying to install RjDj on their Ipod touch, which does not work because we currently only support the iPhone (we are working on an iPod touch 2g version too….) Others tried to use RjDj without headset microphone. In theory that should work but only in theory. Ask Paul who spent countless nights on the audio driver how much he cursed over the Apple SDK…

A few people also reported one nasty problem that really twisted the mind of Paul and Guenter: RjDj crashed right after launch. We are working on this but are still trying to find a way to reproduce this error. If it happens to you, read the bug report and send us an email.

Incidentally, as a 1g iPod touch owner, I’m still looking into that; it comes down to homebrew mic support. Now that Apple has lifted their NDA, I hope developers can start to sort some of these odder driver issues.

It’s something we take for granted: listen to a track, and it starts at the beginning and goes to the end in a fixed length of time. Wonderful things can be done with music that way, and it’s the traditional model of composition and recording. But the equally old, if not older, tradition of improvisation suggests that music doesn’t always have to be linear. It can be specific to a place, a time, a mood.

Now that the technologies that power music creation can fit on a standard mobile device, listeners could have music that’s as pliable when they listen through headphones as it is in a studio when it’s created. Music could respond to the environment you’re in, and sound different each time you plug in your earbuds. That presents new challenges for the people making the music, but it could be an entirely new medium.

The team behind RjDj, a reactive and interactive music platform for mobile devices, don’t just want to wait around for this to happen. They’ve got it up and running right now, in a just-released application for iPhone. I spoke via Skype to the team in Vienna as a crowd of enthusiastic programmers and volunteers hacked away in a massive patching and music-making fest they call a “sprint.” More sprints are planned around the world, and the entire project is being built with the open-source visual patching environment for multimedia, Pd (Pure Data), cousin to Max/MSP.

If you’re ready to geek out with Pd, in fact, you can have at the patches yourself. But even if you’re just an interested musician, there’s plenty to watch here. It’s about more than just the software (Pd) or device (iPhone) – indeed, this app alone is likely to extend to other devices. What it’s really about is a new approach to how to listen to music, how to develop musical tools, and how communities own and share that work.

And, oh, by the way, team members have been behind everything from the port of Pd to Linux to the launch of Last.fm – the latter sold to CBS as one of the hottest musical properties on the Web, and a personal fave among the CDM team. So don’t doubt for a second that this group can drive some serious change.

Chris O’Shea sends along his latest project, a collaboration with sound designer and composer Owen Lloyd called Drop Spin Fade. Part of the Future of Sound tour, Drop Spin Fade allows users to position, sculpt, and play with sound in a 3D environment using gestural control.

Drop Spin Fade

The music/sound environment: Through a series of iterations, Chris and Owen have started simple and built increasingly-sophisticated sonic control using the setup, manipulating granular samples by spinning and bouncing them around the space. It’s not just positioning at work here: you can actually shape the sounds you’re hearing by interacting with the geometric forms in the environment. Eventually, the designers hope to give users more compositional control, making this into a kind of 3D sequencer.

The guts behind the scenes: The work was built to showcase the Illustrious positional sound system, which can use positioning data to create 3D sound environments. For control, the project uses the Gametrak game controller hardware, which you may have seen used in inexpensive golf and other sport games. It happens to be a very nice gestural controller, as well, with extremely low latency when compared to video camera tracking solutions. Visuals and hardware interface are performed in Adobe Director, routing positional control to Illustrious via MIDI and playing a live sound patch built in Max/MSP via OpenSoundControl data. There will be yet another piece as work proceeds on support for the Nintendo Wii controller.

I’m actually quite surprised that more work hasn’t been done with 3D interfaces — though I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, as it’s extremely labor intensive! 3D has focused largely on positioning, but with powerful hardware and software capabilities bring 3D to the masses, 3D interfaces are surely next. Iterations and shared research are vitally important to any medium advancing, so I hope we’ll have more projects in this area. (I happen to be working on something different but related in the 3D space in my own research, which I’ll share when I’m ready.)

Previously from Chris O’Shea land: Muon Speakers, with Processing Visuals