Okay, so let me blab one of our very first ideas for using the iPhone to present sonic creations in a radically different manner. We called it: ookoi's iRingg®. It is ultra-simple. It is particularly brilliant. And it makes essential use of the sometimes almost forgotten fact that the iPhone indeed is also a run-of-the-mill cell phone.
ookoi's iRingg® consists in a collection of 75 loopable sound-bites, in duration varying between 3 and 7 secs. The iRingg® files have been carefully selected and adapted from 1024, a collection of one thousand and twenty-four sound-bites (each of a duration of precisely seven seconds) that in turn were carefully selected and adapted from the ookoi's archived recordings of their live performances, roughly between the summers of 2004 and 2007. The 1024 piece (published as a DVD) consists in the *no beginning, no end* serial playback of sound-bites randomly selected from the collection.
In the iRingg®, the 75 loop-able files are put to work as ringtones, randomly assigned to each one of the items on a user's contact list, which is a cellphone's very heart.
The development of ookoi's iRingg® for the iPhone seemed straightforward enough: the application would upon startup show a cool designed _app screen, which would first allow the user to (i) save her standard ringtone configuration and (ii) randomly distribute ookoiRinggtones over her contacts. Returning to the app, the user would find the options to (i) restore her standard ringtone configuration or (ii) do a random re-distribution of the ookoiRinggtones.
The playback of ookoi's iRingg® would be determined by the order and the frequency with which a given user is called upon by her contacts ... "Wow!" ... that's what we thought ... :-) ...
But our favorite iPhone developer quickly brought us back down to earth: "Nice idea," he told us, but "not feasible with the iPhone SDK. The problem is that the data from the built-in apps is off-limits for developers. Thus, no changing the ringtones..."
[ ... insert short period of sulk :-( here ... ] ...
But, hey! Of course we refuse to be put down by Cupertino rules! Which is why and how ookoi's iRingg® became the first non-iTune Store iPhone app that is not a jailbreak/hack, but which the user will have to execute herself!
Nothing could actually be more easy: visit the iRingg® download-page, have your iPhone and iTunes ready, download, donate and then follow the step-by-step instructions ...!
next : The Future of Music
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