The Incredible Polo, which appears to be an all-vocals, one-man band in the style of Bobby McFerrin, struck upon an innovative approach to promote its new release: a web app that lets you remix its song by dragging and dropping melodies, effects, beats, voices and choruses onto a bunch of animated versions of the artist doing his thing.
In reward for “defeating” each level, you get to hear a new part of the song as an animated video plays. We cracked the first level, which requires using at least seven sounds, each of which is represented by a neat little symbol. We also beat the second level, which requires that you use all of the sounds. By the time we made it to the third round, we were sort of over the song, and couldn’t be bothered to experiment adding elements until we found the precise combination the app was looking for.
But as a demonstration of “outside the box” thinking about how to promote a song, Incredibox is impressive. And it’s going viral, which is, of course, the point of something like this. So far, the Incredibox has 133,000 Likes on Facebook so far — we suspect mostly from France, because they’re called “J’aime”. (Bonus: Instead of playing the game, you can also record your own version of the song by clicking the record button on the upper left.)