Well, Moodagent by Syntonetic , for one, definitely warrants a second look. It’s actually a little unfair to compare it to Pandora because they do two completely different things, albeit in the same manner. Moodagent creates playlists from your stock set of music based on “moods,” defined as sensual, tender, joy, and aggressive, along with a tempo to your liking, to keep your music fresh and continually exciting. What’s particularly great about this is all the music you have on your computer is, obviously, music you love – none of us would keep music on our computers or iPhones that we didn’t at some point actively seek out and purchase. I like to use Pandora for seeking out music I wouldn’t otherwise buy, or to introduce me to new groups and sounds that I probably would never come across. But, it’s true, whenever there’s a song (say, Electric Feel by MGMT – yes, I am a girl) that I just cannot absolutely live without, then I most assuredly will buy it. After that, it pretty much boils down to listening to my own collection of songs, of which I have hundreds, and siphoning them in some interesting way so I won’t listen to a straight down, in-alphabetical order, arrangement of songs that eventually gets stale. I, personally, couldn’t live without the shuffle feature on all my Mac products, but every now and then I’ll even skip a song or two if I’m not in the mood for it. Please, no more Fiona Apple – I only listened to all her albums a dozen times over during my entire High School years, and please, if I want to go dance crazy, I doubt Ryan Adams is going to get me there.

Here is where Moodagent comes in. Whatever songs I place on my iPhone are synced to Moodagent once I open the app. The app has a slick feel to it, with five bars along the top in colors, from left to right, of red, orange, yellow, purple and gray, representing, in order, sensual, tender, joy, aggressive, tempo, each of which is able to be slid up and down to different degrees of preference for that specific category. The higher up I slide sensual, say, the more songs Moodagent deems “sensual” will be placed in my playlist. If you want, you can tinker around with different slider settings, with differ play lists popping up – it’s pretty cool, to say the least.

Let’s say I want a playlist with plenty of sensuality and aggressiveness, but with the lowest settings on the other three. The first song that Moodagent picks, “Heartbeats” by The Knife, couldn’t be a more perfect fit. The synthesized, pseudo glam-rock feel to Heartbeats, with its slowly undulating beat and the pouty voice of the female lead singer just oozes sex, mystery, drama, allure, and flushing skin, a quickening heartbeat. It’d be a more sensual song without the funky synthesize beats, but it’s the, I guess you could say “aggressive” quality of this sound that places it at the top of this custom playlist. The next song in the mix is also a perfect match, “Hotel” by Broken Social Scene, with a similar low, sexy hum to its digitized, hipster beats. But, straying from the more synth type music the fourth song Moodagent picked was Dangerous by Kardinall Offishal (featuring Akon), which is definitely a sensual song with a raw, aggressive quality to it. More surprisingly, this song actually has a more upbeat tempo to it, but it maintains a smooth and curvy enough quality to it that it’s not necessarily upbeat. Were I to dance to it (and I do), it would involve a slow, sensual saunter with rocking hips than it would that frenetic hand waving we all do in bars late at night. Or, well, at least I do that. Hah.

“All I Need” by Radiohead also fit perfectly within the aforementioned scheme – are we noticing a trend yet? Let’s switch up the sliders, shall we? Let’s raise the tender to as high as possible, with a mid tempo, and the lowest setting for the rest. I’m suddenly inundated with a list of very moody, haunting songs from the likes of Sigur Ros, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis (from the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James), Sufjan Stevens, and Feist. Yep, that is definitely right on the mark. Let’s up the joy with mid-tenderness and mid-tempo. I now have a playlist of “Off Broadway” by Ryan Adams, “Impossible Germany” by Wilco, “Crazy on You” by Heart, “Alone in Kyoto” by Air, “Bad Dreams” by M. Ward, “Time of the Season” by The Zombies, and “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson. Definitely an eclectic mix, but does it fit the ticket? I certainly wouldn’t consider the majority of these songs joyful, by any definition of the word, but the beats they exhibit, the musical sensation, without a doubt have a joyful, upbeat bent to them. What if I raise all the sliders to the top? Well, the results turn out to be just as impressive. The first song, “Jerusalem” by Mirah is all at once sensual, tender, joyful and aggressive, with a sprightly tempo. Moodagent does have a surefire skill, through its technology, of achieving sensational playlists.

So, what about this technology? Moodagent’s developers say it:

“combines digital signal processing, music science and artificial intelligence to focus on the way music is perceived emotionally… Moodagent can play any song, no matter how obscure, without language barriers. Moodagent technology creates a profile for every song it encounters and stores it in an Amazon EC2 cloud. To create a profile, the song’s digital signal is analyzed, a segment (or segments) of the song is then amplified and run through 34 artificial intelligence expert systems, which are constantly trained by musicologists. Moodagent is able to create a song profile that measures the degree of each of the song’s characteristics, including moods, genres, sub-genres, styles, tempo/beat, vocals, instrumentation and production features.”

Gosh, no wonder the results are so impressive. I’m curious what the “34 artificial intelligence expert systems” are – as of now, it just sounds like something out of a sci-fi paperback. In any case, Moodagent seems to have the proper backing to create custom playlists ; whether you agree with the mood definitions or not. You might argue there should be more variety in the sliders, but considering the vast range of human emotions and moods, it’s best to keep Moodagent’s range winnowed to a small degree that encompasses a fairly wide variety of songs. It’s already impressed me with its ability to interpret songs based on perceptions of emotion, and I’ve enjoyed the 25 song playlists. What’s also great about Moodagent is the music keeps playing if you exit the app, so in that sense, it works just like the iPod function.

Give Moodagent a go next time you want to try out a new playlist making app for your iPhone – you may just find you’re in the mood for something new.

In my musical repertoire I keep a continual rotation of Fiona Apple, Hieroglyphics, Sufjan Stevens, Wilco, Lady Gaga, Ben Kweller, Nina Simone, Air, The Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, and Cut Copy. Not exactly a uniform showcase of taste. An iPhone app called BandMate by WellAlright claims it will find bands based on location (current or otherwise) and based on the general tastes reflected by the music stored on your iPhone. Granted my tastes run across all genres, I wasn’t sure how this was possible. Apparently, with BandMate you plug in different artists (I added Fiona Apple, m. Ward, and Wilco), and the music app will search for band venues that showcase talent similar to those different artists. For that selection, BandMate presented me with The Dodos, playing tonight at Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco, a good club I frequented in the past with friends when single and living in San Francisco. Too bad they only matched my Wilco interest by 12%, not quite a high enough correlation percentage to get me aching to see them. Thankfully, BandMate provides plenty of information – a large banner picture of their LP, a map directing me to the venue, video links through youtube, other events linked through last.fm, a brief biography, and a link to iTunes to listen to some of their tunes. With the exception of iTunes, all of these features are accessed within BandMate itself, allowing you to stay within the app, something I definitely always appreciate. If I decide I like this band after previewing them, I can share them with friends, add them to my Favorites, and opt to see them at Bimbo’s tonight.

Looking further down my results list, other bands like Built to Spill, White Rabbits, Dinosaur Jr., and Califone jumped out at me with their silly names I can’t conceive how anyone could create – then again, if I ever created a band I’d call it Medley Bedlam, with my release LP titled Breakfast in Bedlam, so who am I to speak. A band called Son Volt stood out to me with their 47% match with Wilco. Not quite a 50%, but the percentage was much higher than all the other 12-14% offerings. I actually revved myself up a bit for this one, thinking I may actually like this band. However, as fate and taste had it, I was disappointed upon listening to them through iTunes, which led me to wonder – how exactly does BandMate make its selections?

The one problem with Bandmate, or any app or program that claims similar, is it follows preferential taste by genre alone. The great thing about Pandora is it detects underlying rhythms and vibrations particular to specific songs or artists you like, so it can formulate a playlist individually tailored for you. As anyone who listens to music knows, music is not easily filed away in properly delineated categories, references, or indexes. Wilco is usually categorized as country, or folk, but they have a unique sound that doesn’t quite follow the trends most likely seen in these genres. The pedal steel is a musical instrument popular among most country bands – whether they be more rock oriented like Ryan Adams, or more folk oriented like Neil Young, or even Bob Dylan – but I dislike this instrument. I dislike the sound and I tend to avoid music with it. Funnily enough, my reasoning for this is usually, “it sounds too country.” As it happens, Son Volt uses the pedal steel in many of their songs.

Fiona Apple, too, has her own distinct sound that’s hard to describe. It’s melancholy and bitter, but also deeply jazzy and uplifting, a sound of red velvet chaise lounges, grand black pianos, and cabaret dancers in fishnet stockings. Despite both being “angry women,” her sound is completely different from Ani DiFranco, and yet she’s not as jazzy and upbeat at Amy Winehouse. Of course, it was hard for me to figure out what results Fiona Apple would get through BandMate because after my original artist imports, I couldn’t refresh the screen to find new local events. The Dodos, the White Rabbits, and all the others reflecting Wilco were there to stay, unmoving. Even after I imported all my iPhone tunes to BandMate, the same results still stared up, unblinking, at me. To make matters a bit worse, BandMate has the odd crash here and there: the first crash I experienced was when I was turning off artists so BandMate wouldn’t find similar songs (I turned off Aesop Rock and Beck), and the second crash occurred when I was attempting to refresh the new Events list. Very frustrating.

For someone whose tastes are bit more uniform, BandMate might actually be a good option to have. My boyfriend is a bit more exacting than me, pueriley and puritanically adhering to Ryan Adams, The Mother Hips, and Neil Young. If he imports these artists to begin with, and uses them only, BandMate could very well work for him (besides, he loves the pedal steel). Once again, it’s hard for me to tell, but it seems BandMate covers the big, local venues – places like Slim’s, The Fillmore, The Independent, the Mystic Theater, and the Great American Music Hall. These are all the top musical venues in San Francisco, but there are plenty other worthwhile, but smaller venues that showcase good talent, places like Bottom of the Hill, The Elbo Room, The Plough & Stars, Cafe Du Nord, and Hemlock Tavern. Maybe if I was able to refresh my screen, bypass this glitch, I would be able to assess how good Bandmate’s venue selection is.

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Despite a desktop client that sometimes crashed and sometimes would not connect I retained my Rhapsody service for the convenience of being able to access my playlists and saved artists from multiple machines, from a browser and also from an MP3 player with the Rhapsody To Go service, a privilege that costs an additional $2 per month beyond the base plan of $12.99.

However after I started using personally tailored radio service Pandora and waxed eloquent about Pandora’s free iPhone app, I realized that my Rhapsody usage had declined considerably and I was able to fulfill my craving to listen to specific songs through YouTube playlists. I even considered signing up for lala.com, a website that allows you purchase songs for as little as 10 cents per song with the caveat that you can only listen to them online.

The last nail in Rhapsody’s coffin was struck when the latest update to their desktop client made my numerous playlists built over the years vanish into this air. Frustrated with this experience, I decided to end my long-term love/hate relationship with Rhapsody and cancel the service. I learnt that while you can sign up for the service online, you had to call to cancel the service. In the few days that elapsed between my decision to cancel the service and making the call, I heard that Real Networks was planning on releasing a free iPhone app.

The decision to wait a few days and try out the iPhone app saved Real Networks a subscriber as the Rhapsody iPhone app has now become the app I use the most on my iPhone. By no means does this mean that it is my favorite app (the AOL Daily Finance iPhone app still holds that spot) as the app leaves a lot to be desired. However this is a really good first effort and for some odd reason I can access my playlists from the iPhone app even if I can’t from the latest version of their desktop client.

Getting to the specifics of the app, you can use the My Library, Browse and Search icons at the bottom of the app to find a song, album or previously created playlist and add them to the “Queue”. The Rhapsody iPhone app then plays music from the queue when you select a song from it. You can edit the queue by deleting songs from it, changing the order in which they are played (a shuffle mode would have been nice), clear out the entire queue or save the queue as a new playlist.

The Browse function also allows you explore and listen to new music; check out staff picks from the Rhapsody team, browse by genres and view charts. There is precious little to fiddle with in the settings tab.

The Positives:

1. The reason I use the Rhapsody app constantly is the immediate access to music and the near limitless supply of new music.
2. It is nice to see that the app by default opens to the queue so that you can start playing music immediately.
3. The app seems to load faster than Pandora and the sound quality is very good.
4. I have been able to play music both from the iPhone app and my computer simultaneously. In contrast if you try to use the desktop client or the web client on two computers simultaneously, one user will get kicked out.

Areas That Could Use Improvement:

1. Allow users to play songs directly from their playlists instead of making them go through the additional step of adding the playlist to the queue.
2. Retain history about what the user was listening to when they quit the app or receive a phone call. In contrast the Pandora iPhone app pauses your music and lets you continue where you left off after a short break. With Rhapsody you have to pick the song once again from the queue and listen to it from the beginning again.
3. Allow users to download the songs onto their iPhone even if it is on a temporary basis in a fashion similar to the way Rhapsody To Go works with SanDisk Sansa MP3 players. This would eliminate the need to stay constantly connected to AT&T’s network or Wi-Fi and would allow people to listen to music in Airplane Mode, in areas with spotty AT&T service (the dead zone on US 101 next to South San Francisco comes to mind) and would free up precious bandwidth in AT&T’s already saturated cellular network.
4. If temporary downloads are not possible fix your buffering system. At this point when an iPhone cannot find the network for a few seconds while listening to a song, it looks like the song continues playing on the Rhapsody server and the listener misses those seconds when the song starts playing on their end again. If the network outage is more than a few seconds, the song starts from the beginning. Neither approach makes for a pleasant listening experience and reminds me of early Discmans that would skip a few seconds when used in a car or while jogging.
5. The app crashes from time to time but thankfully it does not commit the cardinal sin of making the iPhone crash like earlier versions of the game Blowfish were prone to do.
6. The app is slow to respond when browsing for new music or playlists, albums or songs from the library.

If Rhapsody can fix some of these issues, the iPhone app has the potential of reducing churn amongst existing Rhapsody subscribers who are thinking about jumping ship (those Napster Unlimited plans look very attractive at close to half the cost of Rhapsody) and potentially generate new interest in the service from music lovers like me who are not interested in purchasing individual songs or albums nor managing large music libraries.

It’s true, many locals may simply be lounging in their neighborhood park and sticking to the same coffee shop they’ve faithfully sipped their favorite brew over the years, wondering if they should paint their walls and feeling familiar tidings of boredom on the weekends. But, locals and non-locals alike can surely benefit from knowing a little more about what is going on in their neighborhoods, right under their nose. If you’re fortunate enough to own an iPhone, the app Events Finder by Sputr LLC keeps you up to date and notified on music events, concerts, street fairs, festivals, wine tastings, sporting events, outdoor recreation, book releases, movie events, and more, connecting you through event finder sites like Upcoming, Eventbrite, and TicketStumbler. Upcoming, powered by Yahoo!, is particularly great as it covers varying genres of activity, from comedy and performing arts to public educational and political events. Eventbrite is actually used by various oligopolistic, prestigious, and national institutions – MasterCard, Harvard, US Postal Service – and anything sponsored by these giants is sure to be advertised through this site, and by proxy, through Events Finder.

On the home page, you may narrow your search by Who’s Playing, Fairs & Festivals, Sports & Outdoors, or Movies & Book Releases, or you can simply opt to search for everything by tapping Show Me Everything. The app will automatically try to use your current location, but you can opt out of this feature to search for a specific city, town, or other location; at any time you may tap the GPS icon in the upper left to use your current location. By default, Events Finder locates events within a 25 mile radius within the course of a week. Tap on the funny martini-glass-like icon in the upper right to change these filter options. 25 miles is a bit too local for my taste, especially since my current location of Petaluma is more than 25 miles from San Francisco, the closest city, and my best bet for fun activities. 50 miles is a good average choice – not too far, like 200 miles, but far enough to include more avenues – and I like to see up to 3 weeks  in advance. I never book tickets 3 months in advance, but I’m sure my boyfriend – foamy-mouthed and rabid Ryan Adams fan that he is – would relish this option.

As it turns out, Emmylou Harris is playing tonight at 8:00pm, October 6, at the Wells Fargo Center in Santa Rosa. Tapping on this link brings me to a page with the address, a picture of the silver fox herself, and a short descriptive blurb on the event. As with any good source app, the address will link me to a google map so I may map out directions, and a link to the event finder site, Upcoming, is given as well. Too bad this opens up a separate window in Safari, rather than keeping me in the app (this is always frustrating). Since I like Emmylou Harris, with her stately debonair, and warbling mockingbird of a voice, I’ll tap “Add to Favorites” and neatly tuck it away in my Favorites tab for later inspection. If I feel like sharing, I can email the page to myself or to someone else (most likely my boyfriend, since he’s also a rabid fan of Emmylou Harris, though more of the drooling, sedated fugue kind).

Other notable upcoming events in my search radius are the Mill Valley Film Festival at the Smith Rafael Film Center in downtown San Rafael, and, my pick of the litter, Litquake, the annual SF literary festival that spans a week and showcases local and national authors in various events, that grows by the thousand with each coming year. I, despite being a budding writer, have never heard of this event – *Jackie starts buzzing that typical literary geek trend of religious reference and metonymical uses of “blasphemous” and “baptizing”*. Thanks to Events Finder, I’m tempted to attend the Black, White and Read Book Ball this October 9, in particular for the “fabulous and mysterious” dress code (if I were to describe myself as anything, I’d like it to be fabulous and mysterious). Hopefully, the ball (don’t you just love that word? Ball? Gala is too regal, and party just pedestrian) won’t be rife with the excessively and hyper-articulate, those young, starry-eyed 20-somethings prone to literal interpretations of the figurative “rubbing elbows” with highly-publicized authors, and Dave Eggers rolling his eyes in the corner, sipping on his own moonshine concoction. Of course, I won’t know unless I go, right? And that’s what Event Finder is all about.

I would prefer if the app didn’t constantly revert to its original filter options of one week, 25 mile radius search, and I would appreciate better descriptions for some of the events – I realize the app receives its information from those three aforementioned sites, but how hard is it to do a bit of research and fill in a short summary? As someone looking for a good time, I’m more apt to attend the event I can actually read about, skipping over those with only a title and not even a picture to further elucidate. People and institutions hosting such events should also take note, since prompting people to attend requires a week bit of descriptive marketing.

Overall, though, a good app in a pinch, and free to boot, and knowing what’s happening in a week, or just tonight, is far easier when on your iPhone.

To avenge my prior assessment, allow me to give you the tools to make the decision for yourself. Now it is time to determine which music-tap-fest-game isthe best for the iPhone. In this corner is the heavyweight Tap Tap Revenge 2.

This iPhone app follows in the vein of Guitar Hero, and additionally allows for reviews, downloads, and head to head challenges. The app offers career mode which acts as incentive to try all the special features of TTR2 and soon you’ll see these goals get ticked off the list as you become a tap master.

Impressively, Tap Tap Revenge 2 is not only an addictive game, it also acts as a platform for getting to know new music and cure boredom. I was able to play a song and choose from four difficulty levels (sound familiar?). I downloaded a Coldplay song, which very literally and ironicly froze and would not play. On the brighter side, I was introduced to the app’s theme song which had mind numbingly catchy lyrics including “don’t player hate because I dominate”, liberally spread with “global highscore” and the chorus of “tap tap, tap tap revenge”. The app also has hundreds of downloadable tracks, so I’m sure you’ll find something a bit more to your liking.

The app was quite responsive to touch, which I hope would be the case since that is the point of the app. But, as is the case with many apps, there still are bugs to be exterminated. Even extremely popular apps such as Tap Tap Revenge 2  (which has had over 23,561 ratings through the iPhone Appstore since the last version was released in March 2, 2009) still have some work to do.

My favorite aspect of TTR2, is the two player mode. Some people are interested in playing online against strangers, I like to play against my real friends; the ones I see every day. TTR2 gives me this opportunity and you get to fight over who’s really holding the iPod. Can you imagine if it was overlooked to take out the shake for two player? In one player you are often asked to shake the iPhone up or to the side to the beat (instead of tapping). Thank goodness I never came across this in two player mode where we are both using the same iPhone!

This app really does try to include a useful music tool though. After you rate a track you are given a list of the similar artists. Although this doesn’t compare to Pandora on guaging personal taste, I am happy with the direction Tap Tap Revenge 2 is going.

With today being the last day of the week to cover iPhone Music apps, what better way than to end it with a spin off of the incessantly popular Guitar Hero and Rock Band mania?

Guitar Rock Tour is an iPhone music gaming app produced by Gameloft that rides on the coattails of success garnered by Harmonix’s Rock Band and RedOctane’s Guitar Hero. It’s played in much the same manner, tapping the colored buttons in coordination with the rhythm, with higher points earned for jamming nonstop, and losing points for missing a button. As the crowd cheers your rocking out and head-thrashing and super-chill-yo guitar riffs, a lever on the side of the screen fills up with pulsing red light, indicating you now have “Pyro Power,” which you then pull down to incinerate any upcoming buttons on the line-up, saving you some hassle and earning you major points. The crowd also callously, and viciously boos you off stage if, like me, you attempt the Hard mode, and discover the game is much harder when you only have two thumbs to use instead of all five fingers, possibly even two hands as with the drum set in Rock Band. I suggest starting off slow on Easy mode, get adjusted to using your thumbs at the right cadence, figuring out just when to tap the buttons as they cross the line, then work your way through Medium before tackling Hard mode. I think it may actually be possible to develop a new kind of glass-sheared callous a la old-school Ninteno game controller blister, with all the tap tap tapping you’ll be doing at an increasingly frenetic pace.

Three songs are available right off the bat – the classic rock song Rock You Like A Hurricane by the German band Scorpions, You Really Got Me by The Kinks, and grunge-worthy Heart Shaped Box by iconic band Nirvana. I normally opt to rock out on the guitar (desire to be up front and center? Phallic envy? Who knows), but there’s a choice of playing drums, which, thankfully, only display two lines of buttons to tap, since playing with more than two fingers is most likely unfeasible.

I like to jump right into playing with “Quick Play,” but to unlock more songs you must play the “Tour” mode. Other songs include Message in a Bottle by The Police, Walk Idiot Walk by The Hives, What’s My Age Again? by Blink-182, Beat It by Michael Jackson, and many more covering the rock genres of Classic, Indie and Punk.  I have a sneaking suspicion, though, for copyright purposes GameLoft sourced the songs from cover bands, as some of the voices sound just a wee bit different. Just as in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, CGI figures sing and play in the background, though you probably won’t look at them much, other than your slight peripheral vision, as tapping the buttons proves to be far too engrossing.

The game is epic in every aspect, from the lavishly showy intro video, complete with shooting red flares, stadium sweep, and slow motion punk girl strumming her guitar, to the game itself, rambunctious and lively enough to keep you entertained all on your own. The game is laden with hip and cheesy lingo – “crank it up!” – and the main page before starting depicts a lustful, tattooed Agyness Deyn type.

Even if you find Guitar Rock Tour to be so glitzy and glam as to be nauseating, it’s a guilty pleasure, and is a load of fun to play.

iLike has brains. Offering interactivity and a template for musicians to create a personalized app for their music sets iLike apart from many. “We’re encouraged by the positive response our create-your-own-app platform has generated, and this is only the beginning,” said iLike CEO Ali Partovi. As of five days ago, it was reported that 250 musicians had created apps using iLike’s template.

I came across William Fitzsimmons iLike app one week ago. Drawn by the both the references to Iron and Wine as well as a neckbeard to be proud of, I started listening. If this were a music review I would elaborate, but it is not so I won’t.

The app, however is worthy of elaboration. First, the gripes: slow response to tapping. Luckily I was listening to his music while the app was on otherwise, William would have been out of luck. Once the app froze on me, too.

Besides that I think this is a wonderful app. The screen capture shows that iLike’s app is well organized. Once I set the music to play, I browsed throughout the app without musical interruption.

The app offers music, video, photos and general media stalkership of the artist. I found the blog, concerts, and fan wall to be a bit more helpful and interactive. I like that the fan wall sources where the comment came from, because otherwise I may wonder how many friends William Fitzsimmons can get to pose as “fans”. Way to go iLike, legitimizing the features through transparency!

The games section is silly. This particular iLike app had two puzzle games made of William Fitzsimmons photos. They’re pretty hard and enjoyable to do while listening to the music.

It’s funny how often paths can cross again and again. I was planning on going to a concert on my birthday, but because of unforseen events didn’t go. Now I find that had I went, I would have found William Fitzsimmons that night opening for who I would see. As I didn’t get to that concert and I have been enjoying William’s work, It almost seems meant to be that I’ve come across this app.

Bloom doesn’t claim to be a relaxation aid, but the ambient music it conjures is beautifully simple and aesthetically pleasing enough to settle you comfortably and meditatively in the moment. Bloom’s sounds are created by Brian Eno, generally regarded as the father of ambient music, and fellow musician and software engineer Peter Chilvers, and the two of them created an infinitely complicated sound generator of tinkling triangles, digital organs and the echoing drama of synthesized pianos.

The iPhone app displays a multicolored screen resplendent in pastels of pink, blue, green, yellow and hued combinations thereof, the background showcasing a color gently fading into another, with likewise pastel dots alighting onscreen wherever you tap a finger. To create your own ambient music, tap different spots on the screen to play different notes, with lower bass notes covering the bottom, higher treble notes at the top. The notes are arranged in modal intervals so playing a wrong note is avoided. The low notes aren’t very clear through the iPhone’s built-in speakers, so use headphones or plug it into a stereo.

Once you’ve built a pattern, they repeat at an interval, which you can control with the “delay” slider, accessed by tapping the arrow button at the bottom right of the screen. It’s polyphonic, so you can add additional notes each time you go through the sequence. If you take your hands off the screen entirely, Bloom will improvise on what you’ve created, adding to the ingenuity and majesty of the music. Shake the iPhone to clear the screen back to a blank slate of musical possibility, and, if you want, choose among several different moods with aromatherapy names like Neroli, Ylang, Bergamot, Vetiver, and Ambrette, each of which has different color schemes (note that the default setting on Bloom is “shuffle” to rotate among the different moods). Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers were quite crafty in taking full advantage of the iPhone’s most salient feature, the beautiful, bright touch screen.

Though it may lose its novelty within a few minutes of tinkering, spend some time with the app and nurture it. It’s different from other music apps we’ve seen. You may just find it’s the perfect app to have in the background when working, or, as is my case, when writing. There’s something about ambient music that simply sets a mood of quietude and drama, a vivid character many of us could add to the monotony of silence with the odd car engine droning by.

It seems the iPhone is beyond amazing in the musical abilities it’s able to magnify, and app developers are taking advantage of the technology to produce apps that create music, from instrument mimicking to beat makers and synthesizers. ZOOZbeat Classic, by ZOOZ Mobile Inc., is especially impressive because it endows the gift of music to all ages, even those without any musical background or, let’s face it, affinity. Using a gesture-based technology, ZOOZbeat interprets every shake and tilt of your phone as musical notes, the more aggravated and fast the shake the higher the note. As is becoming the norm, you may save any music created at myZOOZbeat.com, where users may listen to and share songs with others around the world.

For structural purposes, there are four musical genres to select from, including Hip-Hop, Pop, Techno, and a simple “Click” tab which just gives a basic quick beat, kind of like a blank slate, for you to really enhance your creativity. Each category has instruments you may play, and a starting background beat is heard, as indicated by a sound wave visual at the bottom of the screen. To switch from one instrument to another, simply tap its icon and watch the instruments rotate to the active one. The hip-hop class, for example, has a snare drum, a hihat, a bass drum, a synthesizer, a scratcher, a bass guitar, and a microphone (present in all the categories). I found particular amusement in the handclapping option given by the techno category, and used it to wide effect in my song titled “techno fastidiawesomeness.”

I found that shaking the phone from front to back produces a more reliable note than shaking from side to side or at an angle – shaking from these angles makes the notes harder for the app to detect and can lead to frustration – but it’s fairly impossible to achieve full autonomy in melody-making as ZOOZbeat will smooth over any jarring flaws of human error. Even if I softly shake the iPhone back and forth at the same pace, ZOOZ will seemingly take liberties in translating the notes as higher or lower, quicker or slower, depending on which sound will better suit the developing mood and cadence of the melody. To further elucidate, when recording your voice, ZOOZ will make sure that even your slurred and offbeat singing will harmoniously coincide with the existing beat. So really, even if you attempt – or mistakenly – create the most jarringly bad cacophony of sounds, ZOOZbeat will magically make the end result bearable.

While some purists may balk at this digital manipulation, I feel the people who will generally be attracted to this app – meaning, children and teenagers who watch American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, and other glamorized, burgeoning talent to the masses – will greatly enjoy their freshman efforts at producing recognizable beats and melodies, just by shaking to their whims and singing whatever comes to mind. ZOOZbeat caters to the creative mind, and encourages that raw originality I hope is inherent to all of us. It helps to instill the belief that you can develop- should you choose to pursue it – a musical talent.

Most of all, ZOOZbeat is truly fun, and the 10 second sound bytes of music you create are usually catchy and easy to listen to over and over. $2.99 may be more than most people are willing to spend on a music app that may lose its novelty shortly after purchasing, but I deem it a worthwhile purchase for any young person interested in synthesizing, digital music, or just plain expressing his musical creations to friends.

I am fortunate to live in an area with so many events. Recently I moved to Oakland. Setting the search results to emcompass my surrounding area as well as include the BART train line in San Francisco, I was happily surprised. This came up with more than 20 events per day. I recently tried Bandloop while in the suburbs and didn’t find a single event. This is not a fault of the app, merely a fault of our society.

This app is one of the handiest I’ve come across; it is the compass to my social life. My sole gripe with the app is that when you look at a band’s or the event host’s webpage, you must leave the app to use Safari on the iPhone. When you exit out of Safari and re-open BandLoop, it does not remember your last search, but starts you off from the beginning once again.

Some of my earliest adolescent memories, the inklings of freedom came at concerts. We are not all so fortunate to live down the road from an intimate venue. Band loop allows us to pass the billboards every day from our iPhones. It allows you to skim the events in your area, keeping you in the band loop. Instead of scouring the internet for obscure venues and obscure artists I was able to instantaneously search through every event that is happening tonight and tomorrow night. This is the bored scenester’s dream, as well as a handy tool for the rest of us who still like to go out spontaneously for a night out at new places listening to new music.

My love for live music goes beyond this post, but I will put this out there: Live music is part of what made me who I am today, and if I had been aware of bandloop earlier, I would have become the frequent night owl much sooner. Now that I have found this app, whenever I have a free night with a few bucks to spare I know where to check.

What am I doing tonight? Maybe BandLoop knows.