Reactive music an inspired idea. The fact that we now listen to music on devices that know so much information that’s specific and unique to our situation – where we are, how fast we’re walking, what time of day it is, at which angle it’s being held, what the environment around us sounds like, and so much more – has raised the question: how can we take all of that information and make it musically meaningful? It’s the question that Michael Breidenbrücker and his team at RjDj have been working on for over two years now, and their work to this day is sure to go down the history books for changing the way that we listen to, experience, think of, and create music.

But, while the RjDj iPhone app is well established among audio enthusiasts, technology lovers and early adopters, and has been making great inroads into figuring out what gets people excited about interactive music, their work has reached far from what marketing heads would call a ‘critical mass’. Until Inception came along, that is…

Just 12 days since release and already over 1.3 million downloads. That’s a pretty impressive feat for any app these days, but it’s even more impressive when you consider that it falls firmly into the niche category of interactive music and augmented reality. We’ve grown accustomed to highly addictive games about catapulting animals or cutting bits of string to help feed a frog leaping to the top of the charts, but I’d argue that Apple should divide ‘New and Noteworthy’ into ‘New’ and ‘Noteworthy’ – placing Inception in the latter…

So what did they do that caused more downloads in one week than their mainstay app accumulated in over a year? Did Rj come up with some new groundbreaking interaction methods? Was it the association with a blockbusting movie? Was it simply the marketing drive?

It’s true that there’s a wealth of interesting interaction methods in the Inception app, including some new ones such as access to weather information, but reactive music producers can tell you that most of the concepts have actually been around for quite a while. And, although the big name film and marketing action certainly won’t have harmed the app’s success it would be unfair to say that exposure was solely responsible for it’s rise the top of the app charts in various countries.

I believe that the main reason for the Inception app’s massive success is more subtle, meaningful and encouraging than any of the above. With Inception, RjDj have found a truly fantastic implementation for their hard work over the past years. After all, the film is all about being inside someone else’s mind, seeing your world in three dimensions rather than two, and questioning the reality of everything that you see and hear. There could not be a set of concepts that better prepare someone for the capabilities of augmented reality.

Traditionally, reactive music producers would have to juggle the responsibilities of introducing people to the idea of reactive music as well as good execution. With Inception, the movie has already put the user in a frame of mind where this kind of non-linearity is possible, leaving RjDj to concentrate solely on the execution, and execute they did.

Whether a significant proportion of the usage of Inception flows through to RjDj’s other apps is yet to be seen – we would hope it does, as it’s a platform that Reactify Music thoroughly enjoys developing for – but, so far, signs are positive.

Maybe the best result we could hope for from this would be that people are generally more open to the idea of their music being manipulated directly by their actions. It’s like RjDj have crept into everyone’s subconscious and faked the inspiration that reactive music is a great idea. If that’s what it takes to launch this wave of music listening, then so be it – just keep your hands off of my projections!