I recently upgraded from a Crapberry to an Android handset, and I must say I am enjoying the difference. I thought it would bug me not having any physical keys but so far things have gone fairly smoothly, and I’m impressed with the OS’s capabilities.

In a few weeks I plan to visit Matt up in the grand old town (city) of York to hopefully play a bit of music (noise, drones, experiments), and I began wondering if there were any apps in the Android Market that would enable me to play my phone as an instrument or make noises with.

The answer is ‘yes’, there are. While I wasn’t exactly overwhelmed with the number of apps, and many of them seem to cater for the vuvuzella/light sabre market, there are some quite fun/useful ones out there and worth giving a mention or at least a try.

In my trials, I came across a range of apps worth a tinker with, some good, some not so. 
Here’s a list of what I found:

• Relax and Sleep – this app is designed to provide a list of ‘ambient’ or ‘relaxing’ noises to help you drift off to sleep, and actually hosts quite a range, though how relaxing is questionable. There are the obvious noises like wind chimes or whale calls, but amongst them are some quite Lynchian sounds such as an air conditioner hum, brown noise, white noise, etc. Some sounds are quite good to use as samples, if you were playing live and that was your bag. You can play several sounds in conjunction with each other to customise your ‘sleep track’ which is kind of cool, but overall this app didn’t really suit what I was after. It’s sort of a Buddha Machine of mundane sounds.
• Speaking of the Buddha Machine, as we were, mine’s a bit low on battery and I wondered if there was an “app for that”. Looks like there is, and it’s called Buddha Voice, presumably for copyright purposes. However this Buddha Machine app, wasn’t quite what I expected – instead of being a bank of droney, mumbly, glitchy noises, Buddha Voice is a catalogue of what appears to be Chinese monk chants and incantations, I assume to assist meditation. Though to my mind, meditation and modern technology (especially smartphones loaded with every distraction the mind can conceive) don’t easily go hand in hand. Again, good if you want an easy sample, bad if you want to customise – this app will just loop an echoey man’s voice ad infinitum.
  Further searching dragged up Las-9 Music Looper which much closer resembles the Buddha Machine that I know and love, giving you a choice of 9 loops to play in conjunction with one another or individually. Very simple to use and the samples are very similar if not the same as those played on the real Buddha Machine. I can even output it from my phone’s headphone jack as I would my Buddha box, however it’s missing some of the charm of the original, which I think is down to the clarity of the samples. They’re simply too clear. In a way, the muffled sound and sometimes crackly quality of the original is what makes it so perfect. This app is great, but the technology almost works against itself, offering crystal clear loops that I just want to dirty up.
• White Noise – here’s an app with a promising name. Unfortunately, it’s not much different to Relax and Sleep, except for the most part, many of the crappier sounds have been ditched leaving airplane hum, ticking clock, train noise, rain, ocean and of course, white noise. Boring.
• Signal Generator is an app designed to generate white noise, pink noise or sine waves to your taste, offering up the ability to tweak the frequency of your sounds. I can’t get the thing to work. Noise Gen seems to be almost the exact same thing, except it works! You cannot however adjust any settings, nor can you play it live. Instead it generates a file that you can then upload to your PC. No fun.
• White Noise – here’s an app with a promising name. Unfortunately, it’s not much different to Relax and Sleep, except for the most part, many of the crappier sounds have been ditched leaving airplane hum, ticking clock, train noise, rain, ocean and of course, white noise. Boring.

By this point, I began getting rather bored of white noise apps, as I’m sure are you. Now onto the juicier stuff:

• Chordbot Lite – not a bad app. Plays out simple chord sequences. It’s basically a tool for sketching out song structures through selecting notes, tempos and adding or deleting phrases. Works well for pop & structured songs, not so good for improv.
• Zaery Keyboard is a simple synth app. You slide your finger up and down the keys and can even employ a little pitch bend. Choice of four voices. Playing is a clumsy affair, possibly due to the limitations of touch screen and the size of the keyboard. Fun, but limited use.
• Ethereal Dialpad – Here we go, now we’re getting somewhere. It’s a simple app, easy to use, but at the same time you have a quite a scope for customising your sound. Basically you just drag your finger around the screen a bit like with a Kaoss Pad, making it great for improv and possibly performing.
• Speaking of the Kaoss Pad, as we were, (am I the only one who find this phrase funny?) there’s an app for that. It is of course KaossPad. Unfortunately it doesn’t live up to the name and comes out as a poorman’s Ethereal Dialpad – dragging your finger around will generate a noise, but a cheap midi trumpet one.
• Ambient Sound Lab – brilliant. This is pretty much two apps in one – a ‘theremin’ (very similar to Ethereal Dialpad in style) but also a tap screen, whereby you tap points on the screen and they begin to chime rhythmically. This is the best part of the app and gives the most scope for playing around with. No matter what you do with this app it will sound beautiful and gives you enough freedom to feel you have control, but injects enough unpredictability that you’ll never be able to master it. Nice.
• Miniseq – another great app. It’s basically a 8 step sequencer with 4 preset instruments, similar lay out to Ambient Sound Lab’s tap screen but far more structured. Tapping the on-screen matrix will trigger sounds that correlate with their location on screen. Very easy to make something listenable very quickly, but obviously in a very structured manner. Still very fun to play.
• Silicon Oxide – a retro sounding drum machine. Not much tweaking to be had here, but it sounds too much like Steve Zissou for me to resist.
• Synthesizer 2 is brilliant, I love it. I have been pissing off the whole office with this all week, which means it’s a keeper. As a keyboard it’s pretty basic, and it lags like a bastard, but this app is too good to ignore. There are just so many settings and variables to modify your sound, you can even set the sound to change as you tilt the phone. It has a really glitchy, retro, lo fi, 8 bit quality. Dirty, messy and raw, it’s perfect for getting noisy in a good improv session. For my kinda stuff, this is the best app I’ve found, highly recommended.