Remember middle school music class and learning to play the recorder¹? Break out the old sheet music because the Ocarina App from Smule will take you there. Throw in the theme music from Zelda and you’ve got yourself a killer app.

If you didn’t know already, the Ocarina is an age old wind instrument made popular to modern day geeks by Zelda². The weird thing is that the iPhone iteration actually works. You blow into the microphone and you are playing your iPhone, just like a recorder. While I’m aware of the extreme nerd value and loss of cool points, you have to admit that there is something novel about it³. While the Smule videos provide tutorials and fellow geeks sitting in circles performing seances, it doesn’t show the most awkwardly nerdy feature of the app. I thought it was strange when it asked to use your location, but here’s why: you can tune into others around the world playing their iPhone Ocarina’s. You can checkout their location and listen in while they sit somewhere, hopefully in private, and play their hearts out. Check out the vid below⁴.

iPhone Ocarina from Teech on Vimeo.

1. I was in first chair consistently [↩]
2. Link was ill with this thing [↩]
3. this from a guy who gave the harmonica a serious go [↩]
4. pardon my ogre-esque handling of my iPhone; my fingers are kinda big for small buttons [↩]