I’m a firm believer that music is the ultimate life hack. Whether taking those first painful steps training for a 5k, or filling the 2,000th cell on a spreadsheet, the right song or album can do wonders for the psyche, clicking your brain into go-mode before disappearing into the background as you reach flow. And then there’s other music that’s right for turning it all off, winding down from a long day in mindful meditation.
Vibes is a new iOS app that wants to write you the perfect song for all these moments. Created by Not Boring, it’s a beautifully animated music generator that will create an endless stream of music—less meant to produce the song of the summer than the perfect subliminal beat.
“It’s like the video game soundtrack for your life, this background music to help you focus, relax, sleep, workout that sort of thing,” says Andy Allen, founder and CEO of (Not Boring) Software.
Allen was inspired to build Vibes after another one of his apps was rejected by the App Store. Called Timer, it was a relatively simple alarm app. But to alert you at the right time, it needed to take over the background audio of the iPhone—the channel dedicated to podcasts, music, and Apple’s own clock.
Apple said Timer couldn’t do that; if Timer wanted to control background audio, it needed to provide sound all the time, not just for an alarm. So audio designer Thomas Williams built a music sequencer. With eight notes and some grounding musical theory logic, he created a sort of generative Jeopardy theme that played until the timer ended. As the notes were constructed in code, they could play forever.
“The craziest thing happened where all of us independently found ourselves leaving the app open for hours and having a really productive session,” says Allen. “It was this crazy moment to us where [we realized that] eight notes played in a random order could hold your attention longer than a pop song that will sound old after two or three plays.”
They honed in on the idea of providing functional music: A growing trend across services like Spotify, which has only been fueled by the latest AI generators. Vibes offers the sonic sensations of pretty much any corner of your life: Rise, Focus, Relax, Sleep, and Move.
“There’s a tricky balance you want to strike with functional music, where you want it to not stick out too much so you can focus on working…yet you don’t want it to be the same,” says Allen. “It can’t just be white noise or your brain becomes habituated to it. You start to look for novel stimuli somewhere else.”
Williams expanded his eight notes on Timer to a full thousand, which are mixed on Vibes into perky, curious xylophone-forward tracks on Focus mode and an ethereal synth beats on Move mode. The result is a collection of five soundscapes that are sonically related—they could all be off the same album—but do poke and prod at your mind and energy levels differently. Testing the app, I found Focus to be a bit too passive for my work. But the uptempo beat of Move was just right. (At this very moment, as I type this, the main melody gave way for a thumping bass kick and my fingers feel like they can fly.)
However, Vibes is not just about what you hear: It’s also an experience built for the screen. And the rest of the app is just complete, celebratory design overkill. Vibes could have been little more than a list of five tracks that you can tap and listen to. But Not Boring eschews app minimalism to create more maximalist digital experiences, which are built to tap the full capabilities of these little supercomputers in our pockets.
That means each vibe is actually its own 3D world. And as the tracks play, you appear to fly over a variety of polygonal landscapes—think The Little Prince—in which trees and rocks subtle depict the instrumentation you hear, kind of like the musical roll of a player piano.
My favorite of these worlds is Sleep, which puts you just above the clouds in a purple sky. Then with a pinch, you can zoom out to fly higher above, adding reverb and cutting the high frequencies from the soundtrack to seem more distant, tucking it further away from your consciousness.
You don’t need to do all of this active engagement with Vibes, though. Vibes works just fine with the screen off, plus you can set sleep timers and play/pause tracks from iOS’s own music controls if you prefer to avoid worlds. It knows when it’s time to “Rise” or “Sleep” based upon a schedule you share. And it will even use the phone’s sensors to track if you’re running, and set the beat to 180bpm to match. Indeed, the beauty of Vibes is as much in the depths of its animated worlds as it is the mindless automation with which it can operate.
Vibes is available now in the App Store, and you can try it for free. To unlock the app’s full functionality, subscriptions start at $5/mo (or $30/year) and include access to the rest of Not Boring’s suite of iOS apps.
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