Imagine firing up an exercise app for your daily run, and hearing the tempo of your musical soundtrack increase and decrease in sync with your heartbeat. With Weav, a song tempo-manipulating ‘engine’ produced by UK-based start-up Cute Little Apps, that could soon become a reality. Lars Rasmussen, whose claim to fame is building the technology that became Google Maps, created the software for Weav with Elomida Visviki to give new meaning to the term ‘interactive music.’
The fundamental force behind the project involves giving the artist control of what happens to the track when the tempo is changed in Weav, the proprietary sound mixing program. “The artist controls the composition, changing the experience depending on the playback speed chosen by the listener,” explained a press release from the company. The idea is an artist would record different part of a song which can be played at different speeds and then Weav will mesh the parts together. Then, the ‘interactive song’ can be played via an embedded player.
So far, several artists have created songs which can ‘bend and stretch’ to allow for playback at a wide variety of tempos. In a demo video, producer Ryon Lawford explains how his song changes when its tempo (in beats per minutes) jumps from 90 bpm to 200 bpm.
“This is the music format for the mobile generation,” explained Rasmussen to Music Business Worldwide. “We do more and more things with an app helping us — this is the first time that music can also adapt in real-time to what we are doing.”
And the app isn’t just made with runners in mind. Regardless of the activity — whether its skiing, partying, or practicing yoga — Rasmussen and Visviki see the potential for Weav to help create your interactive soundtrack.
The company is currently taking requests from musicians who want to participate in the project. While the beta for musicians is scheduled to start soon, there is no release date for the app yet.
