A sruti box or shruti box is a bellows driven harmonium-like instrument that provides a drone, used in Indian music and spiritual practices.
Henry Lowengard’s Sruti Box iPhone application simulates a sruti box with 12 reeds, which can be tuned in various ways, and you pump the bellows by waving the phone. There is a parameter that can be set so you don’t have to do this, but I find it adds to the authenticity in a subtle way.
SrutiBox provides sets of intervals, timbres and voicing controls to build drones for music, meditation, tuning, and educational purposes.
For example, you can use a variety of tuning tables, including Just, Harmonic, equal tempered & Sruti.
Here’s a demo of the Sruti Box in action:
[display_podcast]I like that Lowengard is doing something a little left-field with Sruti Box. I downloaded this earlier – not sure exactly what I’m going to do with it, but it’s three bucks in the App Store (App Store link), so it’s cheap to check out.
Does this work with the iPhone version 3?? It's not appearing on my iPhone desktop even though I downloaded it from iTunes 8.2 just now…
Is there an android app ?