Tools and Toys
The tools range from fun toys to powerful, professional tools, and most of them are free! Many integrate with Google so you may want to create a Google account just for this project - it's up to you. Most, but not all of these tools are web-based.
You should be able to open this up, figure out how it works and have fun with this. There are lots of online "toys" that are actually worth playing with just for the experience, they'll give you ideas.
This category is for things that may take a little learning but don't need lots of effort.
These items will require some studying but are worth the time. You can watch a few YouTube videos to get to grips with it, right?
These are complex tools for those who are more technically minded, or researchers or professionals. But hey, don't let that stop you.
Find the latitude and longitude coordinates of a place here: https://www.latlong.net/ then have it make a poem about that place for you. Or just go to the site and see what it makes.
Not free, by any means (about $29 per 5 minute track), but an interesting music generation tool.
MIT App Inventor is a block-coding tool with which you can create downloadable Android applications as .apk files, FOR FREE!
Musenet takes an "intro" and then "evolves" it with AI in different styles such as Beatles, Mozart or Bluegrass. Interestingly you can upload your own custom midi track and let it evolve that too.
I tried adding a file created by Computoser as a starting point, and I think it made it more Beatles-y but it's hard to tell. Doesn't have a download option.
Designed to blend, or morph, faces together, I added an elephant's eye and got this strange output.
This free desktop app can make some interesting noises, and if you use the arpeggiator (ARP) then you can create almost ambient loops.
Unusual Russian tool for designing interactive narratives or story plots. You enter characters, and locations and plot points, linking them together.
At the end, you can export as a .csv file.
Zine are small and often handmade, self-published magazines.
This tool is something I made so that you can draw all the pages and then download it and print on one A4 or A3 sheet. You can then fold it into an 8 page zine and colour it in.
The source code is here.
Create animated explainer videos, animations and more easily. I made this movie ident in a few seconds.
Minimalist distraction-free text editor. For when you just need to get on with it.
This tool also lets you save to Google Drive or to your desktop.
This tool generates music (based on parameters) in lots of different genres and you get three free downloads. You can get a mixed .mp3 or midi file. Very impressive.
Strange tool that takes the popular sounds from Freesound and turns them into an automatic soundscape.
Crazy livecoding tool for visual effects. Learn a few functions, chain them together, and boom! Crazy!
A lovely tool for creating "unfolding stories" that get longer, interactive narrative style, but different. You can add paragraphs, choices and add image URLs (which is interesting, because that means you *could* use almost any image out there on the web.
For developers, stories can be output in .json format, meaning *real writers* could use this tool to "tell a story" and developers might incorporate it into a game easily. Interesting.
Create your own URL - I made myworldofnonsense, and you have a "live" editable grid you can share with collaborators.
Textable is an Add-on to a really interesting visual tool call Orange3. With them together you can do textual or data analysis and shaping, and filtering, WITHOUT coding.
Lovely free, web-based tele-prompter, or autocue. Really helpful if you're recording a voice track.
It even has mirroring so you can hold a sheet of glass, and reflect onto it, looking straight at the camera. Nice.
An amazing tool to create interactive games with a flow-coding interface, but equally could be used to make training materials. The primary use for this tool is to collect research data about what choices people made.
Free.
If you need to tag, or codify some text, looking for themes in transcripts, this free web-based tool is great.
Change some parameters and let Computoser generate you a music track, downloadable as midi or mp3.
Interesting tool that searches Freesound, and lets you create soundscapes by clicking samples repeatedly, or letting them loop.
An handy extension for the Chrome browser that lets you screenshot the page and save it with cropping or full page.
Not free, but you can use it developer mode to create compelling image-based Augmented Reality experiences. Great tool
Canva's Comic tool, with loads of great templates is fantastic. Start from a layout and you can drag in your graphics.
Give this app a short piece of midi and it will generate a repeating generative version of it, Philip Glass style.
Tonespace lets you play one note and intelligently augments what you’re playing with chords and arpeggios.
It connects via Midi (so to a synth or Garageband) and plays musically similar notes. Because it generates midi, you can “record” it and then use it in whatever DAW you are using.
Works on a laptop or mobile. Point your camera at something and AI tell you what it is (hopefully) AND translates it for you.
Give this app a short piece of midi and it will generate a repeating generative version of it, Philip Glass style.
Random concepts to help with creativity. Amazing what you can make with just three words
Rasturbator is fabulous tool. It chops up your image so that you can print it on twenty or thirty pages, glue them together to fill an entire wall.
Google Colab Notebooks are documents where you can mix notes and Python code.
They are brilliant for creating teaching resources, or, working on a project where you are figuring it out as you go, because you can create little fragments of code, and run them one at a time.
Enter some text, and it gives you your text in lots of weird fonts and characters.
This particular timeline has a collection of disgraceful peoples' pronouncements surrounding Covid, from Toby Young to Julia Hartley-Brewer.
But the tool itself, is a pretty amazing tool for creating timelines, with features such as being able to import from Google Calendar.
Generates a number of random animals for you. If you dig around, it can also generate places, flags, food and lots more.
Another strange tool. Search for sounds, add them, and then draw on the timeline grid to play them to create unusual beats and soundtracks.
Upload an image and this will create you multiple colour schemes based on the colours in the image.
A brilliant tool to morph between two images. You plot the points, it generates a gif file.
WayScript lets you create webhook functions, like APIs, or workflows using a visual workflow editor.
You can use Python, Javascript and SQL.
Select your mood and key, and Autochords does the rest.
p.s You may need Soundflower to record your chords...
This wonderful tune creates interesting chord progressions for you. I tend to choose piano, turn off drums and set the bpm to around 80.
You have to pay to download the midi, but there are ways around this, using tools that turn recorded audio into midi. Although this may introduce errors or inaccuracies, we will live with these happy accidents.
Warning: Profanity! But, based on a training catalogue of lots of lyrics, this Machine Learning tool will take any subject and generate lyrics for you.
Pay your own price for this great downloadable zine-making app. This has to be the winner of THE CRAZIEST APP ever. It's really good fun.