People in the city room

    I don't know what to do with the fact that I can create music that interests me. There's an app on my phone called RockSquare. It lets you compose tiny four-bar loops. Four bars and four parts: guitar, piano, bass and drums. The piano and drums sound pretty representative as does the bass except that you can't hear it over the other parts. The guitar sounds more like a synth and sometimes like another piano; still, it's a reasonably interesting lead voice.
    Sometimes, the parts mesh well enough that it sounds like words. Yesterday, I made a piece that seemed to repeat "People in the city room" endlessly. I can see how a reader might assume that this would drive one crazy (or indeed that that train has left the station in my case), but it was surprisingly entertaining.
    The fly in the ointment is that you can't strictly speaking save these compositions. Your only option is to share with Facebook. As it's a Windows Phone only app and practically nobody else has Windows Phone (and they would also have to have RockSquare) there's not a lot of point to this. However, what you would be sharing on Facebook is a complicated code (rather like on old Nintendo games before they started putting batteries in the cartridges, only with diacriticals) which you can cut and paste into a note-taking app. Unfortunately, I figured that out right after I found out that if decide not to share with Facebook, your composition gets erased. So "People in the city room" will never be heard. And the world weeps.
    However, I have since written one that doesn't suck too badly. If anyone out there has a Windows Phone, I would be more than happy to share. But wait-- there's more! Suddenly, there are Windows Phone apps that don't suck! A new one, called Small Piano, lets you compose. You can either compose on a staff or just push record and noodle on the piano keys, and what you played will be set out on a staff. It's pretty weird, because rather than having whole, half or quarter notes (or whatever), all the notes are displayed as quarter notes and the length of each is determined by the spacing. This makes the app fairly useless as far as being able to copy your work to some other format, but it's still very cool. All I need is something like that for the Casio (only with proper notes and rests) and I'll be going somewhere!