RjDj - experiments with context-driven music

I recently picked up RjDj for the iPhone, alerted to it by reading this by Reverend Dan Catt and actually he's probably mostly said it better than I'm going to but I've got some live piano at the end. Anyway, RjDj is a music app that generates, samples and adapts music based on your environment and context, using the iPhone's inbuilt microphone or, apparently, other sensors. It comes with a number of Scenes, each of which creates music differently, some use samples of your environment in the music and some just modify the inbuilt patterns (the free version just comes with a single scene) and they are planning on releasing more Scenes. Interestingly the scenes themselves are created using Pd/PureData, an open-source sound platform, and then presumably compiled somehow for RjDj.

I've been trying it out and about in town. The app will record itself if you like and this is the 10'28" tube journey from my daily commute one morning, from the ticket gates at Waterloo to the gates at Oxford Circus using the somewhat ambient Eargasm scene...

Play or download the MP3

I also wanted to try some of the scenes with my piano and I found that the WorldQuantizer scene worked well - it loops and quantizes sampled sounds from your environment. So I pointed the iPhone mic at my amp, plugged in some headphones and sat down at my electric piano. Quite an interesting experience this, trying to lock my playing onto the loops which WorldQuantizer generated, and this then feeding back into the app creating an echoing, recursive positive feedback loop. So this is me, my piano and the nearby radiator (warning: jazz-like, ambient music)...

RJDJ World Quantizer Piano by tristanf

If you want to go and play yourself then you can get RjDj from the iTunes store. Ideally I'd like something like the RjDj application but also incorporating fragments of radio programmes, podcasts and your own music collection into its context-driven soundscapes. Could that be a future of music?