How to Turn Your iPhone into a Digital Snowglobe

[Gizmodo]

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Now, try to imagine a 21st century update on the music box snow globe – a way to bring this quaint old piece of machinery into the world of Spotify and Siri. Maybe the snowflakes, rather than a separate music box, would provide the sound, generating new, unique music each time you shook the thing up. And instead of old-timey Christmas carols, you’d get forward-thinking, abstract sounds matching the quiet beauty of any music box.

Interested? Enter Microcosm (free), a new app from Apposite Labs for Apple iOS devices. It does all of the above, marrying beautiful, interactive 3D animation to a sound-generating technique known as granular synthesis (more on that below). Tilt your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, and a cloud of little particles will drift around accordingly, sort of like flakes in a snow globe. Each of those tiny snowflakes corresponds to a small part of the sound you hear. As they float around and rearrange themselves, you’ll notice the sound growing and changing. It’s really something. …

Wieber told us these effects were achieved “using the same 3D sound positioning techniques as a lot of iOS games.” …

See the full story, with a link to the app, here: http://gizmodo.com/5873207/how-to-give-your-iphone-the-snowglobe-effect