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This is a music education game authored by Barry Schuler, Nick Tenbrock and Gary Levenberg. It allows the user to construct songs in various styles, using studio produced music clips. The program is divided into ten musical styles, or studios: Africa, Big Band, Blues, Latin, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soul, Street Jazz, and Techno Pop. Each studio contains its own library of unique instruments, vocals, and sound effects. Africa, for example, features a host of native percussion instruments such as steel drums, the shofar horn, and the unmistakable Winky Wanger. In the Big Band studio, choose from a wide selection of scat vocals, baritone and alto saxophones, and various muted horns. Some sampled sounds are of questionable merit, like the barrage of nonsensical blurbs in Techno Pop and the use of automatic gunfire and police radios as rap instruments. Overall, however, the designers address the diverse musical needs of each style very well. Sound snippets are stored in Windows WAV format and recorded as monaural 8-bit, but they're sampled at a higher rate of 22050 Hz for maximum clarity. The basic structure and graphical interface are identical for all the studios. Each contains a bank of ten unique song loops--prerecorded background tracks of various length and instrumental depth. Use these to form the basis for your musical excursions. Simply drag and drop the tokens representing each song loop into the sequencer, called the Song-A-Lizer. As many as ten loops can be used at one time, in any order, and repeated as often as you like. Click on the Start button, and custom background tracks play as a single loop, with seamless transitions between sections.When you're ready to get into the groove, choose from one of five methods of musical interaction. At the center of the screen are two of the program's most dynamic components, called Mouse Kickers: the Vibe-A-Tron and Bop-O-Rama. Sounds are manipulated by holding the mouse button and scratching the surface at various speeds, as with the finger pads on some MIDI keyboards. Pull-down menus let you assign virtually any sound to each pad. Next to the Mouse Kickers is the Voc-A-Lizer, a push-button bank of eight sampled vocals guaranteed to enliven any song. |
