I’d love to start off by telling you that I lost myself in the sights and sounds of Tonalverse for iPad ($1.99), but the first thing that came to mind as I loaded this app up was: why the heck is it upside down?
Well, let me clear that up: when I say upside down, I mean upside down according to the way I use my iPad 2 with the Smart Cover in landscape mode: lying down on the table with the Home button on the left hand side. I use the vast majority of my apps in landscape on the iPad, and having Tonalverse start off in the completely wrong orientation and without the ability to rotate didn’t quite put me in the right frame of mind to sit back, relax, and breathe.
I did eventually take to turning the tablet around, but Tonalverse still failed to impress me, even when it was right-side-up.
The app basically comes down to tapping on screen to create little coloured balls that create sounds as they pulsate and bounce off of one another. Tapping on screen at random will generate a unique little tune pretty quickly, but you can also ram the balls into one another to speed things up (please don’t quote this sentence out of context).
There are also a few toggles along the bottom: one will put all of your balls away and clear the screen, another will activate boundaries so balls just don’t fly away, and the last activates gravity, causing your balls to drop.
The simplicity of these elements on their own could be interesting and it wouldn’t be a stretch to think of Tonalverse as a make-your-own-meditation-music kind of app, but there’s a strange static that accompanies every single sound in the app that makes the experience feel rough rather than relaxing. When I first heard the static I thought that it could have been a result of a bad connection to my earphones, but it still plays, clear as day, over the iPad’s own speakers. It’s definitely possible that this static was intended as an integral part of the experience, but it’s not part of any Tonalverse I had imagined.
I wish that this weren’t the case, but I simply don’t have any reason to recommend Tonalverse to anyone else, such as the app is now. It’s a cool idea and is pretty easy on the eyes, but I think the rotation issues and static just get in the way of the simple premise, which is to simply sit down with Tonalverse, breathe, and relax.
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Tonalverse was provided by Nick DeBoer for review on iSource. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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