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# Beat Blox is like real-life Patatap
- URL: https://www.killscreen.com/beat-blox-real-life-patatap/
- Published: 2014-09-04T14:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2015-11-17T17:02:12.000Z
- Description: The intuitive, color-soaked beat-making app Patatap is something we still think you should check out. Following in its footsteps is Beat Blox, a grad project by Swedish student Per Holmquist. His piece, created at the Beckmans College of Design, takes Patatap‘s tactility and fuses that with the much
- Author: Astrid Budgor
- Tags: News, beat blox, music games, patatap, per holmquist, real world games, toys, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2024-07-26 09:39

The intuitive, color-soaked beat-making app *Patatap* is something we still think [you should check out](http://killscreendaily.com/articles/what-do-flying-lotus-piet-mondrian-and-frank-lloyd-wright-have-common-app/?ref=killscreen.com). Following in its footsteps is Beat Blox, a grad project by Swedish student Per Holmquist. His piece, created at the Beckmans College of Design, takes *Patatap*‘s tactility and fuses that with the much-vaunted (by your dad, while he looms before his chrome all-tube Marantz setup) *realness* of vinyl: you know, the warmth. The *experience*.

Beat Blox, in contrast to *Patatap*, acts as a sort of meatspace piano roll, the grid-based system of music making you can cue up in Logic or Fruity Loops. It’s essentially like stretching and placing notes in a mosaic of pitch and duration—the Blox in Beat Blox trigger a sensor, which “reads” them as different sounds.

Combine that with three turntables and some eye-catching pastels and you’re 90% of the way to a Dirty Projectors cover outfit right now. What’s most interesting about Holmquist’s creation is that there’s no indication of what placing a block in a given spot will do. Like *Patatap*, it’s a toy that relies on your sense of discovery. It assumes you *want* to explore its possibilities, so the moment when you make sense of its workings tastes all the sweeter.