Inspiration

Inspiration is an application developed to stimulate the creativity of music composers.

Influenced by Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies, and techniques described in several books about songwriting, Inspiration allows its users to get random, more or less abstract advice that can provide ways to handle the blank page syndrome, new "cooking recipes" to create music in general, ideas to develop or finish your last song, write a lot of music in a short time, take different musical paths...

Considering Inspiration as another software adaptation of Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies is wrong:

• Indeed, those advice items are gathered together like the Oblique Strategies, but also other thematic sets like the Horizontal Strategies from -musicalentropy for example, the Frustrated Songwriter's Strategies, the Advancing Guitarist strategies, and others.
• The advice items are classified and can be filtered with numerous tags, allowing the users to target specific needs at specific moments. Some examples of these tags : musical instruments like the guitar, the drums or keyboards, various abstraction levels, themes like motivation, harmony, rehearsals, sampling, the development of existing ideas etc.

Moreover, a special editor is included, allowing users to create their own sets, with an efficient and ergonomic interface. With this functionality, you can :

• Create your own advice sets, corresponding to your needs, your personality, and the way you work.
• Share your own advice sets with all the users of Inspiration.
• Fill a list of composition ideas, new tracks or concepts you would like to work on in the future.
• Have a work plan for your preferred musical instrument, full of random exercises to do or existing songs to include to your musical repertoire.
• Optimize your 20-songs game sessions, as described in the book "The Frustrated Songwriter's Handbook" by Nicholas Dobson and Karl Coryat.

Anyway, be careful about the various things Inspiration can not do :

• Write some music for you.
• Play any musical instrument for you.
• Take all the credits of the music you have created thanks to its advice.
• Fill a lack of technical competences and/or a lack of musical knowledge.
• Replace experimented musician's advice.
• Replace experimented musicians.
• Force you read how to use Inspiration before having any opinion on its concept.
• Bring the beers for the rehearsals.

Change history

1.1.0 (05-Aug-2014):

• Added a link to copy and paste the current piece of advice.
• Added a timer to pick a new piece of advice every N seconds.
• Added a feature to mark a piece of advice as a favorite, and to access to all the favorite items only.
• Fixed various bugs.

1.0.4 (16-Jan-2013):

• The application saves its state when it is closed, and recall it at start-up.
• Fixed an issue with the justification of labels.
• The text editors in the editor tab are now multi-line.
• Fixed various bugs and English translation issues.

1.0.3 (29-Nov-2012):

• Added new advice sets, included with the application and available on the downloads page.
• Fixed an issue with the randomness of advice items drawing.
• Fixed an issue with the tag selector control in the edition tab.
• Fixed various bugs and English translation issues.

1.0.2 (14-Nov-2012):

• Added new advice sets, included with the application and available on the downloads page.
• Fixed an issue with the use of the mouse wheel on any control in the edition tab.
• Fixed an issue with apostrophes in the edition tab.
• Fixed an issue with the randomness of advice items drawing.
• Fixed colour change issues in the main tab.
• Fixed various bugs and English translation issues.

1.0.1 (09-Nov-2012):

• Fixed size of the author description font.
• Fixed various English translation issues.

1.0.0 (05-Nov-2012):

• Initial release for DC-12.