These days, you can take thousands of songs with you in your pocket, share your music library with friends worldwide, play DJ on your laptop, and tune your guitar using an iPhone app. Icelandic singer Bjork’s new album, out today, now takes listening to a new level.
As CNN reported, the app-album Biophilia is a collection of games, visualizations and musical scores that accompany each song, and is also available as a standard audio album like we’re used to. Each song, in effect, becomes its own visual-and-audio experience, letting Bjork’s fans interact with her songs in an entirely new way. Bjork is well-known for her innovative and unique style, and this is no different. To create the album, she collaborated with app developers, scientists, writers, inventors, musicians, and instrument makers to create the full experience.
According to NPR, apps can be purchased individually for $1.99 from the iTunes music store, and each app interacts with its corresponding song in a different way. In “Thunderbolt,” for example, users can change the bass line by tapping on a lightning icon.
“You change the speed of the arpeggio, or the range,” said Bjork in the NPR article. “Basically, you’re like this crazy lightning bass player.”
For those who don’t want to download the full album, NPR.com reported that a free app for Biophilia is also available, in which fans interact with a universe-like image and hear pieces of the songs as the universe expands and turns.
What’s even better is what comes next – instead of having a typical concert tour like most artists, Bjork has planned to embark on a music education tour. In each city that she stops at, she’ll play a few nights during the week, and spend the rest of the time at local museums working with kids on music and science projects. Bjork says watching her 8-year-old daughter play with the Biophilia app of the solar system made her she realize its potential.
“She knew more about the solar system than I learned from five years of school — that certain things are not meant to be in a book, you know? If … it’s more like a little game, then you understand it in 3D, like in space,” Bjork says. “Music is like this: You cannot learn it from a book.”
Here at TakeLessons, we love this idea – mixing music and technology is a great way to engage students of all ages, but especially the younger generation. Teachers, do you use your iPad or iPod during your lessons? What other great ideas are out there? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
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Suzy S.