Songsquares

Songsquares is an interactive Web Audio tool for creating music in the browser.

Play With It

It was born as a final for my Interaction Topics class at Parsons. Always interested in music creation tools, I set out to explore the history of musical interfaces to come up with something that was not only a novel way of interacting with music, but also fun and easy to use.

I was inspired by artists like Beardyman and DubFX who create whole compositions with nothing but looping their vocals, and by projects like reacTable and ToneMatrix which let you physically interact with music.

Songsquares was designed around the concept of ‘building a song’. You start with a metronome, and when you record a snippet it becomes a literal block. Blocks can be placed on the active areas to be played, and stacked and combined with other blocks. The concept of blocks allows you to play around with what fits best in your song. You can easily switch out one beat with another by just toggling an active area or dragging out a new stack of blocks.