Maplewood Inventor Gets App Reviewed on Gizmodo

Peter McClard and Valeriya Tuz live in Maplewood — but also in cyberspace.

McClard is an inventor and Tuz is the power behind the man — getting this information out to Patch, for example. Their children — Solian age 12 and Karina 10 — attend MMS and Tuscan School, respectively. The couple has been struggling away from office space on Maplewood Avenue, but lately have been seeing more success.

One of McClard's inventions in particular has been garnering attention lately: Pixound, an app that lets you "play" images as music, was reviewed on Gizmodo last month and featured on the MTV Hive page.

Here's some of the Gizmodo review:

Pixound brings an intriguing approach to the music app: letting you play any photo as if it were a musical instrument. That was enough to get our attention, and when we first started playing around with the Pixound app for iOS ($1), we thought it was a neat gimmick, but probably not worth a buck.

Then we kept playing, delving deeper into the app's features. Having done so, we think this one's definitely worth a dollar. At the very least, you could use it to take a picture of the people sitting across from you on the subway, and start playing them like a musical instrument.

Due to the odd economics of apps, that ability - something nobody in their right mind would design dedicated hardware for - costs about a fifth of the price of an super-expensive cup of coffee.

Pixound's mojo runs way deeper than just pulling off that subway stunt though. In its default mode, the app lets you play colors (pictured left) using a piano sound, but it also contains every musical mode you can think of, a wide variety of instruments (all of which sound great), a backing drum track, and even the ability to tweak how the app lets you play the various colors in your photos (RGB or hue).

Read the full Gizmodo review here.

Besides being an inventor, McClard is also a musician, an artist who has created dozens of software technologies that are being used in publishing (GLUON, Inc.), business (CaptureWorks, Inc. www.captureworks.com), art (TechneMedia Inc., www.technemedia.com, www.artfountain.net, www.tracymac.biz), and music (pixound www.pixound.com).