Bjork's Biophilia album and app are a thing of wonder. That Bjork was the first big artist to develop an iPad app for an album will come as no surprise to her fans (which I count myself as).
The app takes the form of a galaxy of 10 stars; each star represents Biophila's 10 songs. Each song is a self contained app with a shared general structure: a visualisation of the song that is in play, a game and an essay. A good number of the songs allow the user to make their own music. Having been to a couple of her concerts I can easily imagine her fans pinching and swiping their way through the gig to join in. Bjork is in concert in London in September and I hope to be one the fans engaging with her through the use of the app.
Bjork launched a Kickstarter campaign to convert the Biophilia app for use with android and windows 8. This was being done to support the Biophilia educational program, a non-profit project that had been to cities around the world, teaching children about music and science . The program was designed to be a kind of introductory music course, with no prior musical knowledge necessary. In order to make the Biophilia app– an essential part of educational program's open-sourced curriculum – available to as many people as possible, they were trying to raise some money to pay for making the Biophilia app compatible with other systems as well as providing wages for as yet unpaid volunteer staff. Unfortunately the Kickstarter campaign failed but I would still recommend people download Biophilia if they have an ipad or ipod... it really is an amazing app and maybe in the future the campaign to turn it into an Android app will be successful. In the UK, which has been facing massive educational cuts especially in the arts, apps like this would be great to teach musical theory and lessons.
I will post how the concert went in September and hopefully have some film and photographs of the event showing how the app was used.