The other week, I was asked to review an iPhone app called Voice Keyboard. The application is a piano keyboard, but each key playes a sound recorded by you.

General use
The application functions like a normal piano keyboard. You have a range of keys that represent different notes like E, F, C, A, etc. As anyone could predict, the screen is presented in landscape mode to show all the keys and allow easier two-handed use. In the top left is a RECORD button. When you hit that button, it looks like the image above to indicate that it is recording. On my particular iphone, it seemed to take a second to get there. It’s not a problem if you time it out right, but if you don’t, you get extra silence at the beginning of your recorded audio and that can sound wrong when playing it via all the keyboard keys later. Once you’ve recorded the audio clip, you just play it back with the keys.

By default, the recorded audio is just being slowed down or sped up. The deeper notes take a lot longer to complete playing than the higher notes. I think it’s better for me this way because I like how the higher note sounds overlap the lower ones. You can modify this by hitting the TIMESHIFT button. This will make all the notes the same play length while maintaining the pitch variations. You can also change the playing time by turning off the sustain with the SUSTAIN button. With this turned off, the notes only play as long as you hold them. You can also save recorded audio tracks and load them back up later, looping or normalizing them.

Be creative and have fun
While there may be some practical uses for this application, it served mostly as comedic entertainment for me. Initially, it didn’t do that because I was just blurting out “Joe Tech” or “Test” into it. Then my wife and I collaborated and it got more creative with funny noises and song verses. Get another person in the room, hit record, you laugh, they laugh, stop recording, and then hit low keys randomly and then some high keys randomly. It’s magical. I promise.

At the end of the day, it’s definitely entertaining, but I don’t know if it’s really $3.99 entertaining. Perhaps if there was a more practical use or I saw myself using it frequently, it would be worth the sticker price. The $3.99 price is just not matched to this iPhone user’s current usage. With a small price drop, I could see it going a long way. Now if I could map a single sound to each key, that would be well worth the cost.

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