miniMIXA is smartphone, Pocket PC / PDA and Windows XP desktop music mixer application. You can grab sounds with your device’s mirophones, then mix it with your own contnet, or pre-loaded content from miniMIXA.

This software shrinks the capabilities of traditional DJ loop based music creation hardware down to a protable mobile tool.

This is part of a growing trend in music production technology. By making the tools easier to use, and portable, music creation and sharing becomes more accessible to the amateur and non-technically literate music enthusiast. Apple’s Gargeband and other “iLife” tools were some of the first examples of really easy to use desktop computer multi-media production tools, released only a few years ago. Now, we are already starting to see these applications find their way into mobile computing platforms.

receiver magazine recently published an article by Tim Cole, the creator of miniMIXA:

The mobile phone as the next electric guitar? We all know that the electric guitar changed the face of popular music, but what’s this all about? How can a phone be a guitar or other instrument? Why would anyone want that, anyhow, and who would want it?

Since my youth I have been interested in musical instruments and the power they have. I can still strongly recall seeing a movie on television, nearly 35 years ago, where a boy was playing a flute to a seemingly attentive killer whale. I will never know what the real impact was, if any, on the whale, but seeing a child playing a small musical instrument and commanding such attention and communication - potentially interspecies (!) - made an indelible impression on me. I often come back to this image as it provides a convenient and vibrant example of the many factors and relationships at play in music making - the artist, musicianship, performance, audience, instruments, melody, sound design, analogue/digital, meaning, communication, expression, attention, and so on.

Since that initial impression, and prior to reaching the view that “the mobile phone is the next electric guitar”, a lot of water has gone under the bridge. I have found that the journey has, to some extent, determined the destination, so it seems appropriate to tell a bit of the story. In 1986, after reading Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, I was hit by a crazy dream. Fuelled by the thoughts above, I decided to try to build a small hyper-instrument, a hand-held sphere as I imagined then. I wanted to build something that would allow others to create beautiful, interesting live music and I envisioned this to be something that would allow one to interact, live, with an audience…

Read more at receiver magazine.

miniMIXA is smartphone, Pocket PC / PDA and Windows XP desktop music mixer application. You can grab sounds with your device’s mirophones, then mix it with your own contnet, or pre-loaded content from miniMIXA.
This software shrinks the capabilities of traditional DJ loop based music creation hardware down to a protable mobile tool.

This [...]