New World Gaming: SimCity Meets Music Making on the Isle of Tune

Isle of Tune is a brilliant and elegantly designed web-based music game/toy that turns user-generated songs into self-contained mini worlds. You create a city made of discrete components like houses, trees, and so on, and assign musical notes/rhythmic values to each, then connect them all with a road. When you're ready, add cars, hit Go, and the cars trigger every note and sound as they drive past. Just as cool, you can share your island and rate others, yielding a nice ecosystem of user-generated content. It's created by UK web developer Jim Hall (who unsurprisingly, has an amazing homepage), built as a labor of love in between commercial projects, with a desire, as he tells me, to make something "like a combination of SimCity and Michel Gondry's fantastic Star Guitar music video for the Chemical Brothers."

"As a kid I used to love messing around with ProTracker on the Amiga and I'm always drawn to cool interactive sound widgets (eg. Andre Michelle's ToneMatrix, Korg Kaosilator, Reactable etc.)," he tells me. In between jobs, he sketched up some concepts "that would hopefully combine the intuitive fun of a sound toy with a construction set interface allowing users to create and share tunes." So far, that goal's been a success: Though it only went online last week, Hall tells me "there have been 5,556 islands created, and around half a million bits of road have been used!"

A version of Isle of Tune for the iPhone and iPad is coming soon, and Hall has been tweaking the game and improving the UI based on user suggestions. "The project is a success only from the creativity of users," as he puts it. "While I plan to keep building on the online version, some of the coolest features I really want to include will end up in the iOS version as the limitations of Flash (and my programming skills!) make them impossible to implement without causing performance issues." His goals beyond that are even more ambitious:

"[I'm] really interested in applications like this for use in music therapy and schools," Jim Hall tells me. "Ultimately I would also love to see it as a giant touch-screen installation. If someone can construct this:

"Just imagine what they could build on a huge city with more sounds, vehicles and roads!"

Hat tip: Kottke.

 

Comments

[Dizzy Banjo]

This is great stuff :) might be interesting as a collaborative thing.

[Mistletoe]

Oh this is too much fun. If you don't hear from me for a while, know I'm safe and sound there.