Very recently i made my third ever iPhone paid app purchase, a “sound augmentation experience” app called Dimensions. It’s made by the same people that made the Inception App, and it’s a similar concept – certain iPhone-detectable conditions activate a “Dimension” (such as “lots of movement”, or “not a lot of noise”, or “it’s raining outside”), and each Dimension takes sound from your current environment and modifies it in some way, usually in conjunction with some preexisting background music and noises to help create more atmosphere.
Last night, i happened to have the app running and the earbuds in while i was working on the computer. I also had VLC player running through some random telly because i typically do that when i’m working on things non-music. And a true random synchronicity moment happened that will never ever happen again out of pure chance. My VLC player had just started another episode of Sherlock, and the opening titles started to run. At the same time, the Dimension that i was in started to play a section involving whole note chords played by a piano. And they both lined up.
I don’t mean just rhythmically either, although that in itself was pretty uncanny since both tempos were similar enough to line up the entire run of the Sherlock opening credits. But both happened to be in the same key, and both happened to move through chord movements that had the same root movement. It was like i was listening to an enhanced version of both, that these independent parts were meant to be interlocked together.
It blew my mind.
At some point when things calm down, i’ll find a way to record the Dimensions music in question and then mash it with the Sherlock theme so you can hear what i’m talking about. The fact that it happened by the rarest of circumstances coming together is one of those special moments. I want to find a way to replicate that in my own art; not sure the best way to do that to maximum effect, because i want it to be non-obvious but still discoverable. We’ll see; an easter egg of that sort of nature is either one of those needs-a-lot-of-careful-planning sorts of things or one of those just-make-it-up-as-you-go-over-a-period-of-years sort of thing. I suspect given the sort of project schedule that i keep and the general schedule that i keep that any application of this will be the latter rather than the former.
