BeatBlocks is a playful music-making app that lets you build your own music using Lego bricks and other real-life construction blocks. Choose from a range of musical styles and start building, recording and sharing your beats.
BeatBlocks brings the play out of the screen and into the real world to let you get hands-on with music making.
How to play? BeatBlocks uses the camera on your iPhone or iPad to detect blocks of different type and colour. To make music, simply lay out different patterns of blocks in front of the camera. A repeating 8-beat loop will play and on every loop, when the app sees a brick, it will play a sound: so as you build, you make music.
To change your loop, just move or scatter the blocks around, try out different colours, and wait for the loop to come around again. The left-to-right position sets the timing of each musical note, the top to bottom position selects which note/pitch to play, and the colour sets the instrument. The app also lets you adjust the tempo, swing, key and scale for your loops.
Save and share your beats! When you are ready to show-off your compositions to the world, hit the record button to screen grab a video of your performance. When you are finished, simply choose to share or save.
BeatBlocks is free to use with some feature limitations for up to 300 loops per day in trial mode. During music-play, you can earn in-game credits with every loop of music that you make, or via in-app purchase: use these credits to upgrade your instrument library.
To remove the daily limit and feature limitations, please support the work of the team at Playable Technology by upgrading to the full version.
BeatBlocks was launched at SXSW 2023 representing the UK Immersive Futures Lab, and is winner of the silver medal for use of AI at the 2023 BIMA Awards. Playable Technology’s AI-powered music-sequencing technology has already been star of the show at the “Turn it up” interactive music exhibitions at the London Science Museum and with “BeatBlocks Live” at the National Museum of Scotland during the 2024 Science Festival in Edinburgh. Download BeatBlocks now and let the loops begin!