Building Bloks

UK – BlokDust combines sound with visuals to create a multisensory musical composition.

• BlokDust is a web-based visual music-making app
• The open-source program was developed by Luke Twyman, Luke Phillips and Edward Silverton

BlokDust enables users to build musical compositions by dragging and dropping colourful blocks into patterns, rather like pieces of virtual Lego. The app lets consumers play with synths and samplers to create self-playing sound environments, which are built up into aural and visual stories.

With its easy-to-navigate online tutorial, the site is much more user-friendly than other music production programs, but still allows for competent music producers to create much more complex compositions. ‘It’s a web-based app in which you can create your own music, synths and sound art in a way that is very visual, tactile and fun, but also pretty powerful,’ Twyman told Insomniac.

The app, which was launched on Reddit, is also focused on making the work shareable, with users able to generate a unique URL to the finished piece.