Block Jam

2004

Henry Newton-Dunn (JP)
Hiroaki Nakano (JP)
James Gibson (JP)
Ryota Kuwakubo (JP)

Experiment with music, let yourself be inspired and give your creativity free rein—Block Jam opens up a totally new approach to music. With it, anybody—even those with no musical training whatsoever—can design a personally customized sound.

Block Jam consists of 25 intelligent cubes, each of which stands for a particular musical sequence that the user can assign to the cube from among 15 different possibilities. Juxtaposing and arraying the individual cubes triggers the respective sequences and produces music.

Special cubes enable the user to further influence playback properties. With so-called Play Blocks, musical sequences are started or stopped. Path Blocks make it possible to specify the order in which the cubes are played.

The basic idea behind Block Jam is to create a user-oriented digital music system. The advantages of digital media lie not only in their high quality and tremendous storage capacity but also in the possibility of opening up new forms of creativity to composers and users. In addition, Block Jam has been designed to foster collaboration among several users on a single piece of music.

Block Jam received an Honorable Mention in the 2003 Prix Ars Electronica’s Interactive Art category.