Making music with a cellphone? It’s certainly possible, as occasionally  reported here on our favorite blog, Ovi Daily App. Naturally, though, there are some limits to what a pocket-sized, general-purpose device can accomplish.

This is what struck us, anyway, as we played around with a sextet of apps that strive to simulate a piano on touch-screen models of the Nokia phone line. These apps are, in no particular order:

Pocket Piano, $1.99, from Better Day Wireless

iPiano, $0.99, developed be Impetus Technologies

Dancing Piano, $1.99, supplied by Bay Area Party

Piano Touch, $0.99, by Yeni Mobile

Touch Piano, $1.99, from Activate

and

AnimalsPiano, $0.99, also from Yeni Mobile

Each has its own quirks and abilities. But none, as you might expect, will make you rush to put your Steinway up for sale.

Some observations, again in no particular  order:

Pocket Piano simulates a full 88-key keyboard one octave at a time. Its sound reminds us of a cymbolum, that hammered dulcimer commonly played in Eastern Europe. You can scroll the phone’s window left and right to reveal any section of the full keyboard you’d like to perform on. Pocket Piano also enables you to record your playing, though there does not seem to be a way to keep recordings as files that can be played back later.

The iPiano app is perhaps the most sophisticated of the lot. It, too, enables the recording of tunes and you can save these recordings. Trouble is, the recordings do not capture the original playing’s timing or rhythms; recorded notes get played back in a quick string of notes. That’s good for making pianistic ringtones, perhaps – these the app can load into your phone directly – but not music per se.

Also included is a demo recording, featuring piano backed by rhythmic chords and, scrolling across the top of the screen, words to a song. That song is “Ek Hasina Thi,” a Hindi pop hit. The app also has a simple teaching mode, in which keys get highlighted in red to show their order in a melody. Five demo clips are included, one of which is “Ek Hasina Thi.”

Dancing Piano puts a new twist onto piano playing, quite literally. The notes it plays are controlled by the phone’s motion sensor, the idea being that as you move the phone back and forth in the air – while dancing, perhaps – your movements will trigger it to play notes. The app plays only a C scale, but you can tap on a set of 14 pads shown on the screen to make it repeat a few notes each from a variety of major and minor scales.

Frankly, we’re not entirely sure what the point of Dancing Piano is. It makes sounds, for sure, but one’s control of those sounds is limited, at best. And from all we could see on our N97 phone, tapping on individual keys, which the app displays as a standard piano keyboard octave, does nothing at all.

PianoTouch is a straightforward piano simulation. Its main feature is the ability to graphically scroll up and down the keyboard with a touchscreen slider. Somewhat mystifying, though, are the labels it attaches to these keys: For example, it calls what we know as the C, C#, D, D#, and E keys as l, o, m, p, and v, respectively. And this sequence changes depending on the octave you look at. Go figure.

Touch Piano provides a 15-key keyboard that synthesizes the sounds, more or less, of a piano, chorus of violins, flute, saxophone, and guitar. (The most pleasing of these is flute, to our ears.) The app comes with five pre-recorded music clips – “Jingle Bells” and “Silent Night” are two – of less than a minute long.

Winner of the goofiest touch-screen piano app goes to Animals Piano. It enables you to choose from four different animal voices for its 16-key keyboard: dog barking, cat meowing, bird chirping, and fish gurgling. No recording is possible. This one’s for the children in the family.

Now, here’s the kicker. The problem with all of these apps, and it’s a significant problem for anyone really wanting to make music with any of them, is that each falls woefully short in interactivity. There is a frustrating delay – a good fraction of a second – between the time you tap on a graphical key and the moment the corresponding note is heard. This makes it quite difficult to create or play any kind of satisfying music.

The reason for this delay, we surmise, is that these apps demand too much from the phone’s central processor – which has been designed and optimized, let’s not forget, not for making musical sounds but for handling a bunch of other, arguably more-important tasks. There are two basic ways to digitally synthesize musical tones, either play clips of audio that have been recorded previously from other instruments or generate the appropriately shaped waveform on-the-fly by executing an algorithm. The first method requires a fair amount of memory to keep an audio clip for each piano note ready to play at any instant while the latter method requires substantial computing power to synthesize complex waveforms. Somehow, these apps, no matter which method they use (and we suspect they are all using the former, pre-recorded method), fail to respond quickly enough to re-create anything close to a good musical instrument. What a shame.

Still, your mileage may vary. We tried these out only on an N97 device; other phones might do better. So, for the right person in the right mood, these apps may prove just the ticket. Try some out and tell us what you think.