“We believe there’s a need for a fun and super playable jamming app” said seeper Founder Evan Grant.
Collaborating with Ninja Tune, home to Amon Tobin, Bonobo, Mr. Scruff and many others seeper have created an innovative app where songs are released in “Tunepacks”, a brand new format, which could change music distribution. When played within the app, each Tunepack gives the user access to over forty different elements of an original tune: beats, vocals, melodies, effects and more. The jammer can hit play, sit back and listen to the tune, or start using the intuitive interface to re-imagine the song as they desire by mixing, glitching, looping and re-timing, whilst applying effects and firing samples over the top.
Collaborating with Ninja Tune, home to Amon Tobin, Bonobo, Mr. Scruff and many others seeper have created an innovative app where songs are released in “Tunepacks”, a brand new format, which could change music distribution. When played within the app, each Tunepack gives the user access to over forty different elements of an original tune: beats, vocals, melodies, effects and more. The jammer can hit play, sit back and listen to the tune, or start using the intuitive interface to re-imagine the song as they desire by mixing, glitching, looping and re-timing, whilst applying effects and firing samples over the top.
Unlike many other music apps, the Ninja Jamm experience is very hands-on and immediate, the human feel is key to the enjoyment. You can touch, tilt, shake and use multiple fingers and thumbs to Jamm and record, create a killer version of a favourite Ninja Tune and instantly share it with the world through Soundcloud, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
seeper built Ninja Jamm using open source libraries: The backend audio engine is built in ‘PureData’ and runs on mobile courtesy of ‘libpd’. The front end user interface is built in C++ using openFrameworks with the store developed in device native Objective-C. The main programming challenge was performance, getting PD and Ofws to run with the hardware available on a mobile. Working with loss- less audio meant bigger file sizes, however seeper balanced this against the quality and performance saved by not needing heavy decoding.
“I’m into anything that invites people in.... I really like the app: it just says ‘Go have fun and if you’re enjoying it... dig deeper’” - Amon Tobin
“I should take it to my show tonight and just play this... I’ve not seen anything like it.” – Bonobo
