http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Y9RO5aaYWA

Apple has shared its list of the best music and iOS apps of 2010 and a surprising category is Generative Art & Sound.

While Synthtopia has been featuring generative music and art for years, it’s rare to see it get mainstream coverage – and even more surprising to see it get its own category in a “best of the year” round up.

Here are the 11 Generative Music and Art apps that Apple has selected for its best of 2010 list:

• Little Uzu is a kinetic multitouch particle visualizer, for anyone who ever loved spirographs, fireworks, planetariums, lava lamps, light sabers, pen lasers, tesla coils, christmas lights, or graphing calculators.
• ARTREE is a tree-generator technically. With a tap of your finger, ARTREE’s generative algorithm begins growing a unique tree, with its own unique shape and life.
• The Aeolian Harp is named for Aeolus, the ancient Greek god of the wind. Wind harps are the oldest forms of automatic music. The app uses the wind harp as a metaphor and allows the user to create relaxing animations and sounds without musical knowledge.
• Bubble Harp is a combination of drawing, animation, music, art, geometry, and gaming. You can record long movements of a single point, or stream many points out of your fingertips like ink.
• Midnight is interactive particle simulator which responds to your touches in natural way.
• Gravilux lets you draw with stars: it’s a combination of painting, animation, art, science, and gaming. As you touch the screen, gravity draws simulated stars to your fingertips.
• Beatwave is a matrix synthesizer that offers a broad range of instrument samples wrapped in a beautiful visual interface
• Line Art is an interactive visual toy. Thousands of particles that respond to your touch, and as they move around they leave behind a colorful line.
• abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz is a sound toy, a performance tool and an art work. You can play with the letter-creatures and watch and listen how they interact with each other or use them to produce soundscapes like you would with an electronic musical instrument.
• GyroSynth is a gesture driven music synthesizer for the iPhone 4, which takes full adventage of the gyroscope. You can play and modulate the sound by moving your hand through the air – just like the legendary Theremin instrument.
• Thicket is an audiovisual world of texture, movement, line and tone. Thicket is part art piece, part toy, part wind chime, part spiderweb.

Apple’s pick of generative music and art apps leaves out some of our favorites – like Brian Eno’s Air – but the list is an interesting collection of inexpensive apps that are bringing generative art to a mass audience.

Check out the list – and let us know if you’ve got your own favorite generative music and art apps.