I downloaded the app and headed to Micky D’s for a breakfast boost. The app uses your phone’s microphone, the GPS (I’m guessing) and the gyroscope to create a aural landscape that builds upon the physical landscape surrounding you. To progress in the game, you have to trigger certain responses in the programming be being still, or active, loud or quiet for certain amounts of time as you interact with the physical world around you. Stay with me here, it’s actually pretty ‘trippy’. In the different, levels, or ‘dreams’, as the app calls them, you hear the other-worldly and ominous music from the movie mix with the amplified and augmented ambient sounds that are with you all the time in your hum-drum daily activities. Snapping your coat closed, opening a door, a message from the conductor, someone sneezing next to you or asking you for directions turns into a slow-motion, echoing, melodramatic phrase that you can’t help but elevate to significant or important in you mind as you process the event as if it were the first time you’d come across it. I was impressed. I heard things and saw things that I never cared to pay attention to in the past. Before long, I was moving differently and speaking differently and purposely doing things to in the ‘real’ world to try and induce more audio stimulation in my ‘dream-game’. Fun huh?

The point of this excruciating app review is to call out the importance of non-musical sound in our everyday life. We spend so much time trying to block sound out, letting it back in full-force can feel liberating. Maybe that sneeze is important for me to hear? Perhaps the sound of someone approaching me from behind in the hallwayshould sound a little scary? Can we truly say that we’re living together in the same world when we can’t hear each other? From now on, I’m going to be more aware of all the sounds that present themselves in my audio life, whether I’m dreaming or wide-awake.

In the app world, synth software  tends to either mimic a  real-life instrument or act as a kind of abstract, rub-your-finger-here noisemaker.

Bebot, for the most part, manages to do both in a fun package.

The interface is beautiful, in a retro-future-ish kind of way, and the Bebot’s “dancing” while you play is kickass without being distracting.

One of the most important parts of playing an iPhone synth is repeatability; it’s easy to make cool sounds, but can you play them again and again? Fortunately, Bebop has an optional “note grid” that shows exactly where to press, and you can zoom in or out to either show more notes or make a smaller group of notes easier to press.

It’s a real instrument, too

Click to view larger

Bebot is highly customizable. Double-tapping an icon in the bottom-right corner brings up an options screen that makes adjustments to effects (echo, chorus, and a warm, buzzy  overdrive) or the scale itself (see image). Being able to customize the scale makes it easier to play along with other instruments and lets you change the feel of your music without altering your playing style. An adjustable Autotune even snaps your finger presses to specific notes, and multi-touch lets you build chords.

After you’ve built a custom scale, you can save the preset for quick recall, although it doesn’t save your effect settings, which is annoying.

Even better, if you want to just mash your chubby hand down on the screen, turn off the Autotune and enjoy a full chorus of R2D2-style robo-bloops.

Bebot is fun to use, sounds great and makes a great tool for laying down synth tracks.  Here’s a quick track I recorded with Bebot: (I ran Bebot through the izotope Trash distortion plugin, so the sounds are slightly different.)

Bebot was created by Normalware and is available from iTunes for $1.99.
The video below is an in-depth Bebot walkthrough by the talented Jordan Rudess.