Last updated on February 15th, 2026 at 01:30 pm
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music – Music Game Review
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is a Music/Music/Puzzle game from NatureGuides Ltd., first launched in 8th July 2015.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 1,193+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Steve Reich’s Clapping Music Stand Out
The game that improves your rhythm by challenging you to play Steve Reich’s groundbreaking work Clapping Music – a piece of music performed entirely by clapping. Tap in time with the constantly shifting pattern, and progress through all of the variations. If you slip up or your accuracy falls too low, it’s game over.
“Maddeningly addictive” – The New York Times
“Might be the toughest rhythm action game since Rock Band” – FACT
“Brilliant – and infuriatingly addictive” – The Guardian
“Clapping Music is Rock Band with better music (yeah, I said it)” – Kill Screen
Features:
• Improve your sense of rhythm by playing Clapping Music
• Play through three levels of difficulty – can you become good enough to perform?
• Hone your skills in Practice Mode
• Find out more about Steve Reich and his work with interviews and performance footage
• A stunning design and interface that changes colour as you progress through the piece
• Completely free with no in-app purchases
If you enjoy the app, don’t forget to rate it and leave a review.
This Music game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 16th August 2020
Recent improvements include:
Minor bug fixes
Download & Availability
Steve Reich’s Clapping Music is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Steve Reich’s Clapping Music on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We love it. Its so hard but so fun. Our band director suggested it and Im having a blast. 10/10 would recommend.
Our late, brilliant music theory teacher Sen Diebler introduced us to Clapping Music in 1995. He would be delighted with this app, and probably have a few suggestions.
We came across this app after seeing a Steve Reich video by gerubach on YouTube. This is a great little app. Its very well designed. It helps develop a rhythmic feel without having to know musical notation. We found it initially frustrating and difficult, but then we realized that you can adjust the practice settings to slow things down and work on specific patterns before adding them to all of the patterns. We found that working in one pattern per day, gradually increasing the tempo was optimal. Once you learn to feel the rhythm, it becomes quite easy. We wish there were other rhythms beyond xxx-xx-x-xx. Update: Im realizing now that there are some bugs in this program. When we open the app go to setting to increase the tempo, then practice, the tempo remains slow. When we set it a second time, it works. Also, we let practice run without clapping and it scored our 88% accuracy.
Super fun if youre practicing your rhythm and tempo.
Best way to practice!!!! Designed wonderfully for percussionists and musicians in general who wish to work on this skill.
This is such an fun app!!! Im a dance teacher and this is a great thing to play for rhythm training. When we play it, we feel so happy.
Each time we play this game we feel we're dump But we guess that makes it such a great thing. It's not easy, it'll make you work and improve.
Can you add an option for musical notation view? Would be more fun for those who can read rhythmic notation. Thanks.
The visual cues on screen dont match what we hear, which makes it pretty difficult to play. It would be awesome if there was an option to view the patterns written out in notation while playing the game. It would also make the rhythm practice done in the game more practically applicable for musicians (seeing rhythms you play in the game written in notation will make it easy to recognize them immediately in a piece youre sight reading or whatever). Just our two cents we hope a dev sees this. :).
But its just unpleasant to play. Missing one beat will send you back so fast and its just not fun when you miss one beat and have to start over because of how fast the game will kill your run.
This app is so frustrating. The authors developed a made-up form of music notation instead of just using standard music notation. We assume its to get around copyright law, which is also lamejust pay the publisher. Also, Im pretty sure its incorrect in placesits hard to tell, for sure.
There is a heavy sound and tapping delay when using AirPods that make this basically unusable. Please fix.
Its been our dream to learn this piece and this app is a god send.
Our wife has already asked us to stop.
Sharpens your rhythm, soothes your mind.
Harder than it looks. We hope to be a pro clapper by the end of this madness.
We have terrible rhythm sense. This is addictive and entertaining and is improving our sense of timing.
Fun way to test your rhythm skills and a great tribute to Steve Reich! Surprisingly challenging, like the actual piece.
This app is great for drummers practicing rhythm. We only recently found out about it and we love it.
Steven Reichs ClappingMusic App is a very hands-on, fun app to be available on the App Store! Not only is the game fun, but it is also very addictive! We cant wait for more from this amazing app! Through all the hardships, consequences, and obstacles Ive gotten through this game, we still love that this application is a very challenging obstacle for any individual to play! You just have to have the ears for it, of course! :). Otherwise, this game is one of our favorite applications that are downloaded onto our iPhone! Sincerely, us (Anonymous)! :).
This app is great for any rhythm enthusiast.
This is so addictive in a good way. We love getting to experience this music.
This game is a fantastic tool to train your finger accuracy for rhythm especially if you play piano/keyboard or electronic drums with finger drum pads.
This app is absolutely terrific, our independence in part playing has become so much more solid! Im totally addicted, love this.
Finally beat the hard level. Only annoying part are the pop ups asking for a survey that no longer exists.
Good so far, but where is practice mode? Very challenging for us.
Its a great concept for an app and we want it to work so much! But for whatever reason, there's intolerable tapping latency on our iphone xr that makes it basically useless. We hope the developer can fix that. Ill check back and change our review if it does. After some more play im increasing our review to 3 stars. The latency seems to be related to using blue tooth head phones. If we play on the iPhone xr speaker, its better. There's still a little too much lag in the sound for our taste, but at least the timing records accurately and doesn't boot you from the game for errors. So its not useless, but dont plan to play with wireless headphones until the developer updates.
All of the practice patterns play the sound of pattern 1. Please fix.
The app is fun but doesnt work with Bluetooth. There is enough latency to throw off the timing using Bluetooth headphones. Once we plug in hardwired headphones the timing is fine. Given that most new Apple devices dont have headphone jacks, it poses a problem.
Why does the score say twelve reps each but on that app it changes? Easy is 8 reps each. Hard starts with twelve then switches to 8.
Ive love this app for a really long time. Ive recently come back to it after a year or two away, and Ive noticed that the patterns are out of order from what the original piece is. The pattern no longer just moves forward by a beat, the order seems arbitrary. Youre not supposed to sync back up with the original clapping until after the 12th pattern, but for some reason pattern seven is exactly synced up with the ostinato clap. Still super fun, but maybe an update along the way made the patterns got out of order.
Havent tried the app yet. Hope it doesnt crash.
We had this game downloaded a while ago. 4 stars because it's very frustrating and confusing at first.
We love this idea and the app works super well – but the pattern changes are not correct. Youre supposed to move back an eighth note with each change but on the app the first change is a quarter note and the patterns seem generally out of order, which defeats the whole purpose of the piece. And if you clap the piece as the composer wrote it, you fail the game :(.
We tap right when Im supposed to but it doesnt register until .5 seconds after we tapped. We like the game. Plz fix.
This is one of the best things we come across. As a drummer we could always use methods to improve rhythm and this app is SO fun. Plus we're a fan of Reich. Music for 18 Musicians? Come on. So good. BUT. It started crashing today. And not even a crash that we can recover from. Once it crashes we can't open the app again, because it'll crash almost immediately. We deleted it and re-downloaded, and it worked for a bit, but the same thing happened again. We're intensely bummed out because we have so much fun with this. We read a similar complaint in a review…from one year ago. So our hopes about ever being improved are not high. That being said, this app idea HAS to be expanded upon somehow. It's too good a method to teach rhythm and more needs to be done with it.
This app is really interesting and fun. Its easy to start but hard to stop.
Great game! We asked our 6th grade students to download it.
Don't be turned off by the music needs reviewing this app. It's fun for everyone. Essentially guitar hero for this one piece of music. Our only complaint is sometimes there's a hiccup or some lag so our tap registers a bit late. We're on an iPhone 6 so it could be better on a 6s. Dunno. Fun app for free tho. Can't complain too much.
We absolutely love this! So much fun! Just got it an hour ago and we are already going to the hard level. We love this.
Thank you for making this great free app! This is a chance to perform a challenging rhythmic composition with Steve Reich.
Really addicting. We feel like it has a lot of educational potential in a music classroom or something. It's not only fun, but feels productive.
This is not an easy app. It's rewarding, but not easy.
Great for improving your poly-rhythm skills.
Did this piece in percussion ensemble last year. Switching to the next level just means you're dropping the rest in between the last two 8th notes and the first three, so instead of going 123-12-1-12-123… You'd do 123-12-1-12123… When the bar shows up.
As a former percussionist, it is our duty and pleasure to love this app. We even developed a technique so that we can use larger muscles for more accurate tapping. We hold our phone in our left hand and rest the right side of the phone on the second knuckle of our right index finger. We then rotate from the elbow to tap the screen with our right thumb (similar to Stevens grip). Anyway, this game is beautifully designed and a joy to play.
We love the game but the app crashes upon exiting practice mode and must be reinstalled.
Man this (like so many rhythm games) could be so fun if it just included traditional Western notation! We suppose the dots are for accessibility but we're too lazy to relearn something we spent 30 years learning already ;-).
We were really confused the first few times we tried to use this app. We were clapping along with the pattern exactly and still getting 0 points. Then for some reason it finally dawned on us to try tapping on the screen. Why call an app "clapping" if there is no clapping involved? That's just stupid. Call it TAPPING.
We're really excited to use this app; it looks well built. It is malfunctioning at the moment. Tried on iPad (2015) and iPhone 6s Plus, both devices it crashes after one practice session and absolutely will not reopen whatsoever. Deleted and reinstalled the app on both devices without success, the problem prevails. Please fix, Adam Neely's video on clapping music got us pumped to try it.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.0.7
- Size: 25.71 MB
- iOS: 9.3 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: NatureGuides Ltd.
Last updated: 16th August 2020 | Genre: Music, Music | Developer: NatureGuides Ltd.