Apple does it again! I haven't even seen this app in person, but the stuff about it online is so powerful that it's hard not to exult. Apple is just about to make available -- at an unbelievably low price -- a music app that allows you to do sophisticated music projects, that includes a huge number of electronic instruments, a large number of vintage guitar amps, and all sorts of other goodies. This new program, GarageBand, is part of Apple's iLife4 suite -- the "office" for the rest of your life. It includes iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, iMovie, etc., and now this music app, which of course is integrated into all of the others so that now you can not only create music, but save it to iTunes, use it to score your movies, burn them onto DVD's, etc. etc.
The thing that gets my juices going is that I've all along believed that soundscapes (particularly music) are essential to our meaning-making, and that the best way to learn how to engage such meaning-making well is to do it. Now an app exists that makes it possible not only to play music, but to create it -- and to mix and match it in complex ways, thus teaching people not only about melodies, but harmonies, rhythm, keys, etc. etc. I just am so psyched that someone out there continues to care about supporting creativity and imagination in broad-based ways!
I realize that there will be people -- perhaps even my mom amongst them? I'll have to talk about it with her -- who will not see electronically generated music as the equivalent of music generated via strings, keys, and so on. But I think it's an artificial distinction, and that more to the point, this kind of program will make it possible for people to learn about the complexity of music. It will still be important for people to play instruments -- and this app allows people to record their singing, their playing, etc. right into digital files that you can then manipulate. I can't wait until January 16th, when the program is actually released.