Swedish electronic music producer and DJ Cari Lekebusch has partnered with audio-visual startup Chroma to develop a music-creation app. It is called EZPZ (pronounced: easy-peasy) and is aimed at non-musicians to make them feel, if only fleetingly, that music creation is not out of their grasp by letting them “doodle” new creations.
Lekebusch said, “EZPZ creates a space for an unprecedented, engaging way for fans to explore and interact with my music; it’s not a record, an MP3 or a digital stream, but an audio-visual experience that allows the listeners to also be creative.”
Andreas Pihlstrom, CEO, and founder of Chroma added, “EZPZ gives anybody with a smartphone an opportunity to create music, enabling professionals and music lovers alike to play with sound for a dynamic experience.”
When installed, it asks you to wear earphones for the best audio experience and then you start to draw on the screen using your finger. Doing a squiggle triggers a sound. It is then repeated and looped. From there, you can build up a “track” by layering on new sounds and percussion. You can also tweak the sounds you have made by adding delay and reverb. The longer you keep playing around with it, the denser it gets. Pretty soon the image on screen starts to look like a Jackson Pollock painting and sound like darting between different rooms in a club at 2am.
It is, we should point out, tremendous fun.
There are clear limitations to what it can do, all usage is conditional and the original creator has approved what sounds can be played around with by users. It is a comforting UGC walled garden.
In an age when the record and publishing industry is enormously spooked about generative AI music apps that can be “trained” on existing music – with huge panic over what this means for copyright and safeguards against plagiarism – something like EZPZ is probably about as far as they would like technology and music creation to go.
The problem, of course, is that it will – in the minds of some users at least – feel restricted and restrictive when there are a mushrooming number of AI tools that let them do whatever they like and use the entire history of music as the starting point.
