For his third-year project at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, student Ruslan Gaynutdinov developed Sona, an iPad app that offers a very modern take on the classic '80s game Simon. Like the iconic toy, it relies on the user remembering a sequence of touches and presses that correspond to notes and other sounds, but the interface is far more complex than anything Hasbro could produce. As Create Digital Music points out, the resulting sounds have more in common with Brian Eno than the simple bleeps and bloops of the original.

In Sona, ambient sounds are generated through the manipulation of a set of circles — these circles can be simply tapped, but, more interestingly, they can also be chained together, sending musical signals between each other. As shown in the video below, the links between the circles can also serve as strings, being plucked by free-floating objects that travel around the screen. It's not yet clear whether Gaynutdinov plans to release Sona in the App Store or elsewhere, but we'd certainly like to explore its intricate interface first-hand.