Emergence is Digital Zen
by Eric March on June 26, 2009 at 11:35 am
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(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)
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App Name: | Emergence |
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| Developer: | Riada International Pty. Ltd. |
Version: | 2.0 | |
| Publisher: | Riada International Pty. Ltd. |
Size: | 9.4 MB |
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| Category: | Entertainment |
Price: | $1.99 |
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Ever come across one of those things that’s difficult to classify, impossible to quantify, frustratingly hard to describe, and yet remains oddly compelling, and the reasons that it is are tantalizingly elusive? That’s about as close as I can come up summing up Emergence, despite the fact that this says absolutely nothing about it.
Emergence defies any one specific description except to say that it’s kind of a toy, kind of a music composition tool, kind of an interactive art generator, kind of a mood enhancer/complementer, kind of … a bunch of things. The top-level idea here — and this is as far as I can condense it — is that you can pick a “mood” that combines a preset assortment of musical instruments with a preset dynamic visual style based on the mood it represents and it will play the music and draw dynamic, moving, slowly evolving artful shapes.
The problem is, reducing the description to a single sentence like that almost completely leeches away all of the flavour this app has, because Emergence is really about what’s under the skin. Take the artworks it creates. It’s hard to tell specifically what it’s doing, but it appears to be some type of hybrid procedural fractal generation thing going on. Depending on the mood, images are generated from a selection of algorithmically generated shapes — boxes, circles, lines, scribbles, spirals, radials, figures and more. Each shape used in that mood has a certain probability of occurring. Furthermore, each mood has certain parameters, such as which musical instruments are attached to it (I’ll get to the music in a bit), its background gradient (tons available), the colour palette to use for the shapes (again, tons available), whether shapes cast a shadow, their transparency, the blend mode they use (multiply, screen, overlay, etc.) and more.
That in itself allows for an infinite amount of possible visual moods it creates — although by default Emergence comes with only 20. But the real kicker here is that you can use any one of them as a base and modify every single parameter to come up with your own completely customized mood. There are an almost overwhelming number of options to choose from here to allow you to tailor the visuals just so, and your custom moods can be saved and named and edited as much as you want until they’re just the way you want them. When the mood is running you can scroll and zoom around, call up the menu with a tap-and-hold, mutate the shapes, and more. If a particularly pleasant shape comes up and you don’t want to lose it, you can even “bookmark” it and then come back to it at any time; or you can save the image of the shape to your camera roll or E-Mail it to someone. The images it saves are larger than the screen, by the by, so it’s more than just snapping a screenshot.
Now, about the music. First and foremost, the music is generated algorithmically in real-time using the anhemitonic pentatonic scale. In English: That’s a 5-note musical scale that doesn’t contain any semitones. This particular scale is ideally suited to algorithmically generated music because each note sounds good with each other note; there are no semitones that can come in randomly and out of context to make it sound like a child mashing randomly on a piano. That means a simple algorithm can be built to generate random but still pleasantly sonorous music that sounds kind of like an improvisational expressionist jazz piece or something — and being algorithmic, no “song” is ever the same twice. As with the visual portion of Emergence, the music, too, can be customized from twelve available instruments, from jazz bass, cello and guitar to “Izmir Ambience”, “Goria Atmosphere,” and thunder, to name a few. Instruiments can be recoded along a kind of fred board/piano (though no keys are visible), either your own compositions that can be saved and played back at any time, or you can start a one-session composition going and have it evolve the composition (or not — evolution is a toggle) as it goes, even with the ability to specify the volume, and the lowest and highest notes each instrument should explore when evolving the music.
Come on, even though it’s difficult to conceptualize from mere words, this sounds pretty cool, right? I mean, just based on all of the parameters and things you can play with, it’s pretty impressive — and I haven’t even covered everything. Did I mention that you can enable an on-screen clock to use it as a nightstand clock? Set a sleep timer for the music? Toggle music generation on and off? Disable screen dim? Toggle whether to play audio when locked? Combine audio effects with your iPod music, or just play your iPod music? Set the shape mutation rate? The on-board help? There’s really a wealth of options and configurations and posibilities here.
This is really an app for tweakers — people who want a kind of zen relaxation tool and want to be able to explore the infinite possibilities it has to offer. My only real complaint I suppose is that it needs to offer a bit more interactivity. When a mood is playing there isn’t really a whole lot you can do outside of the customization. Panning, zooming, and mutating the shapes are about your only interactivity options. Otherwise the shapes simply zoom in and slowly rotate all by themselves, periodically swapping out for newly mutated shapes. Riada are aware of this though and are exploring ways in which they can add more interactivity. However, even without that this could best be considered a pleasantly interactive art and music creation app with boatloads of configuration options the tweaking and exploring of which in itself has its own zen-like qualities — there really are infinite possibilities and discovering new combinations of parameters to create new and beautiful abstract works of art combined with either custom or dynamically generated music, and stringing them all together in moody, motion art with sound is surprisingly calming.
Its real problem lies in its defiance of description — it truly is the sort of thing you really have to play with and experience to fully comprehend. Mere words and screenshots can’t do it justice, and I’d have done a video except I just didn’t have the time to do one up that would have done any justice to what this is all about — and if I were to explore everything in a video it would probably take more time than YouTube allows a video to be. Besides that though, part of Emergence’s artfulness is in its subtlety that itself wouldn’t necessarily communicate well through a highly pressed YouTube video, even if deigned to encode my video in HD. Mind you, there are those who might even get the app who still don’t “get” it in spite of everything. I mean, just have a look this in-depth review left on the App Store by some Zen master:
1. Blaaaa (v1.1)
(1 star) by Blue spice on 12-Apr-2009
Looks like mold
Brilliant assessment there, Spicy Smurf. We should all have such acute powers of observation and communicativeness. You are a credit to your species, whatever that happens to be.
But I suppose when you do something that’s off the beaten path and a little avant garde you’ll inevitably attract useless commentary from the beer hat-wearing philistines in the peanut gallery. For the rest of us who can appreciate an artful touch, Emergence is a subtle yet well-concieved app, and while it isn’t for everyone, those who can dig this sort of thing should really enjoy exploring those myriad nuances and features it has to offer. Like I said. It’s subtle, and it’s really the sort of thing you need to try yourself to fully grok. There is no lite version yet, but Riada are also working on that too, so you will soon be able to properly experience a taste of what Emergence is all about before taking the plunge to the full thing. In the mean time, words and a bunch of screenshots below (which themselves don’t even cover half the app) will have to do.
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