A new music app called BubbleBeats was released to the Android Apps Market recently which is a little unusual in it’s premise.  It is an app to create music playlists with a distinctly visual twist.  The description reads:-

BubbleBeats is a cool new interactive jukebox tailored for Android devices that makes organizing music … fun.  By playfully arranging colorful bubbles, you create complex probabilistic playlists that infinitely delight in reasonable yet unpredictable ways.

You start with a blank canvas on to which you can place ‘bubbles’.  The user can assign a song to each bubble as well as choosing the colour and size of the bubble.  Bubbles can overlap with other bubbles and it’s the way the bubbles overlap each other that determines how the app plays music.  A group of overlapping bubbles is called a ‘foam’.  When one bubble has finished playing, the app then chooses the next song randomly from the other bubbles that are touching or overlapping with it in the foam.  It’s difficult to explain exactly how this works, so check out the vid below for a better idea.

Having had a play around with this for a little while, I have to say it’s pretty good fun, certainly, it’s a lot more interesting than creating a playlist using the normal method.  But, I’m not convinced I’ll feel the urge to continue using it after the initial novelty wears off, other than to show people how the concept works.  It’s also difficult to tell at a glance what each song is; should you want to play a specific song you’ll need to either know exactly which bubble you want, or tap a few bubbles to find out which song they’re connected to.
This is a great idea, I’m just not convinced that it’s going to be anything more than a gimmick.  It does open up a few possibilities with regards future uses or expansions for the software though, and perhaps it’s the sort of thing that one of the phone manufacturers would like to have on their phones out of the box?