As I play through Electroplankton, I'm reminded of one of the displays at EPCOT Center's Land of Imagination; a unique hands-on visual and audio experience where you raise and lower your hands in various colors of light to create different sounds at higher and lower pitch. It's this mixture of tech and audio that's both mesmerizing and engaging, and Nintendo's captured that same feeling with this unique Nintendo DS package that's as far from a formulaic game as you can get.
Toshio Iwai has spent an extensive career approaching music in unique and interactive ways. Iwai's past work has been seen both in museum displays as well as in retail product (Sound Fantasy for the Super Famicom, as well as Sim Music on the PC), and Nintendo's creative Nintendo DS system is the man's latest canvas.
Electroplankton, just released in Japan this past week is, essentially, interactive audio art. Within the cartridge are ten different, unique themes of audio manipulation, each connected in the oceanic theme of marine creatures providing the sounds of Electroplankton. These ten different themes give players different styles of touch-screen input to create what can potentially evolve into hypnotic or soothing melodies emanating out of the DS speakers or headphones. The Japanese version actually comes packaged with a set of earbud headphones so that players can get the full aural experience.
In each of the different Electroplankton themes, players manipulate each of the marine creatures, their environment, or both to produce sounds and melodies of various musical instruments. Making what could be considered "music" is definitely hit or miss, since much of Electroplankton's composition-creation comes from simple random touch-screen taps. You're just as likely to create jumbled noise as you are melodies, but its in that creation period where the fun in Electroplankton comes from.
In "Tracy," for example, sounds are created by motioning a path for one of the six different Electroplankton creatures to follow. The entire motion of the stylus path affects the audio that's played when the plankton moves along it; the direction affects the pitch of the note, and the drawn pace affects the length of the note played. Stereo effects come into play by where the path is drawn -- if the plankton's on the right side, the note plays through the right channel.
"Luminaria" is a variation of one of Iwai's existing music art projects. Here, four plankton of different instruments and speed move along a path of arrows, each arrow registering the plankton to play a specific note, as well as tell the plankton which direction to move next. Using the stylus, tapping on each note will rotate the note one notch...or even send the arrow spinning for a random direction. The four plankton will work together to produce "music" as they move along the grid.
"Lumiloop" offers up haunting composition with a "spinning" motion; like the sound of running a wet finger along the lip of crystal goblets, music is created by spinning one of five different roundish plankton at different speeds. Clockwise produces different sounds than counterclockwise, as does continuously spinning the plankton faster and faster.
My personal favorite is "Hanenbow," one of the only themes where the plankton aren't the note makers. Here, you'll simply manipulate a series of leaves jutting out of a pond of water. Tadpole-like Electroplankton leap out of the water from another leaf, and when they bounce off the plant they'll produce a note. The angle of each leaf is critical in continuing the leaping plankton on the path to produce a hypnotic melody. The position on the leaf determines the note played, and the leaf's instrument changes the more an individual plankton bounces off of it.Continues