I spent waay too much time on Incredibox.com last night, and I’m itchy to get back home and play with it. In fact, I wish I had it available to me right now so that I could tweak a little background music while I work.
Incredibox allows you to mix your own music (what I might refer to as trance, correct or not) by selecting aspects of the groove such as vocals, beats, voices. You have several of each category to choose from, and you simply drag and drop them on to “singers” who keep appearing until you have 8 (?) making the contribution you assigned to them.
You can remove your performers (and corresponding beat/effect) from the mix, or mute them and bring them back in. When you add a new effect, it automatically waits until time to come in at the beginning of a new phrase.
All of the effects are designed to work together, so it’s hard to make something that sounds bad, but you can definitely put together a train wreck. I’ve found my favorite mixes end up being 3-5 elements constantly going, with 2-3 that I add, remove, or mute as the flow dictates.
After a few tries, I was making what I feel like were pretty cool 3 minute “songs” with a definitle beginning, middle, and end, with cool little elements thrown in.
There’s a shuffle button, which will add effects at random so you can just play it in the background. I had it one for a bit, but it was a little too random for me and I kept wanting to remove something that came up and didn’t sound “right”.
You can record your mixes and post them for other users to vote on, but I haven’t had time to play with that aspect yet.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the visual interface is pretty entertaining, too.