Yellofier: Find the Music in Every Sound

By Carolyn Heneghan

Music is all around and can be created using just about any noise imaginable. Harness the power of found sound with Yellofier, an app that makes anything into music, and create new and unique songs within minutes. Boris Blank, head of the Swiss avant-garde electro duo Yello, invented the app along with Swedish producer Hakan Lidbo to revolutionize the way users think about the musical potential of the everyday sounds around them.

To begin, record a sound. This can be anything from your own voice or a musical instrument to random sounds you create with the world around you. When you are finished, Yellofier will have analyzed and cut that recording into eight individual sounds, each represented by a different colored square. You can find where the sound came from in the recording by looking for the color-coordinated line on the sound graph.

Now that you have your set of sounds, you can explore them by clicking on the corresponding square. Start fooling around with them to find a beat, or move the lines on the graph to edit the order of the sounds. Press the play button to play back your song.

Now it’s time to edit. Click Edit Song to be brought to a screen that has the song you just created in sixteen smaller boxes stacked in a square. Click on that square to bring up another screen where the sixteen boxes are larger and there’s a selection of colored boxes and effects on the right. From here you can further reorder the individual colored sounds and add effects. You can change the tempo of the section you are editing or even randomize the boxes to create new sound sections you hadn’t thought of yet.

Once you have that portion of the song to your liking, return to the former screen, and click on another box to either extend the song (boxes in the same row) or layer more sounds on top of it (boxes in the same column). This is how you can create anything from melodies to drum tracks using just these colored boxes and effects.

You can also use sounds and exclusive tracks already built in to the app. Blank created many of the sounds, and you’ll find more from artists such as Trentemoller, Orbital, Booka Shade, Henrik Schwarz and more.

You can save your completed song or share it via email or a sound file export.

What’s so cool about this app is the ability to select, rearrange and transform sounds into actual music. Ordinary sounds around you become musical instruments, and you can create anything from serious compositions to silly songs using funny noises.

One drawback is that you can only record one sample at a time per song, so you can’t use multiple noise samples in the same track. Also, you can’t save any sounds you create (only completed songs), so you have to use it in the song you are creating at that moment and try to recreate it later for other songs.

You can download Yellofier from the iTunes App Store for $2.99.

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