With over 4,000 sounds and a grid made up of 30 musical blocks to play about with at any one time, you can imagine how excited I was to get my hands on this app. The description of ‘musical entertainment application for adults and children’ put me in mind of such gems as Opal Limited’s Bloom and Melodica by CandyCane LLC, both of which are excellent music making apps which require no musical expertise. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for Melodic Screen.
Yes there may be thousands of bass lines, drum beats and animal noises to choose from, but once placed on your musical grid alongside whatever else you have chosen, these noises are just that…noise. All the various instrument sounds are not constructed to a particular scale or tempo, resulting in just a mush of noises all playing at once meaning there is no scope for making any actual listenable pieces of music.
Pros: It’s so badly done; it almost has a strange (dare I say it) “charm” about it. Anyone who wants to press a button and hear the sound of a cat meowing over and over again will be in their element.
Cons: The sound options are difficult to scroll through and there is no option to save your horrid creations.
The only use I can find for this app is the button which gives you the option to fill the screen with 30 random ‘sounds of children’ (which sounds terrifying and wrong, but is actually full of animal noises and vehicle sounds rather than babies crying). I can see how this part of the app could be fun for parents teaching their young children what noises animals make. I feel going in that direction with this app would have been a far better idea than trying to pass it off as some sort of musical entertainment.
