
Ten years ago ambient visionary Brian Eno and software designer and musician Peter Chilvers released a groundbreaking ‘generative’ music app for iPhone – Bloom. The award-winning app changed the way people viewed the iPhone’s creative potential in a time when the technology was new and most apps were functional at best.
For the app’s tenth anniversary, Eno and Chilvers have “developed, augmented and expanded” the new program, ‘Bloom: 10 Worlds’.
For the 10th anniversary of ‘Bloom’ Brian Eno and software designer Peter Chilvers have updated their groundbreaking generative music app.
Eno first began collaborating with Peter Chilvers on the EA video game, Spore, where they discovered their shared interest in generative music – music that can make itself. The original app created stems of notes and an interactive visual display as a user touched a device’s touchscreen.
The program required no musical training and was intelligent enough to let users craft beautiful melodies with little input. The duo expanded their ‘Generative Music’ project over the years, with other apps such as ‘Scape’, ‘Reflection’ and ‘Trope’.
Eno originally said of the original that “Bloom is an endless music machine, a music box for the 21st Century. You can play it, or you can watch it play itself.” The new version promises to do just that and more, with a larger range of sounds and visualisations.
The product description claims, “If the original Bloom was a single, then this would be an album.”
The Generative Music website states that preorder will be available soon but officially, Bloom: 10 Worlds is set for release on the 7th of December and for the first time it will be available on Android devices.