The beat designer | Per Holmquist | TEDxGöteborg
[Music] I'm thinking that there must be so much creativity inside people's brains that will never get out and I think that only in this room there's a lot of creativity inside your brains that will never get out because to get out the creativity needs to be like canalized through a craft and a craft that often takes a lot of time and effort to learn like painting for example I believe that you might have the most amazing paintings inside your brains but the hand that holds the brush just doesn't cooperate with the brain and I don't think that the paintings inside your brains have to be amazing or something to deserve to get out I just think that letting creativity out makes people feel good and that's amazing so what about music I love music I think music is great and I love the fact that when I hear a song I'm able to like it or dislike it or maybe I kind of like the melody but I don't like the drums that much so obviously I do have a lot of thoughts and preferences about what I hear thoughts that I think that I should be able to create something with instead of just thinking if I only had access to the craft needed to create music so 4 years ago when I turned 25 I got this yuk from my sister and I thought perfect now it will finally happen I will learn how to play an instrument and I will be able to create my own own music and I thought maybe I could learn a software as well and start to create like yuk house music or something and and get famous like a aii maybe um but no of course not I struggled to learn some chords on the UK but it was impossible and I wanted to create music not bend my finger fingers in impossible ways so I gave up but actually I got some revenge on the aichi thing um because me and some friends were dejing at parties that we organized at beckman's the school that I went to and we were no Pro DS at all we were beginners really um but one night we wanted to at least feel like Pro DJs so we created this program by using a webcam some face detection technology a picture of aichi and a big screen we made this it might be hard to see on the pictures but the webcam was filming the DJs us and then replacing our faces with avi's face and then showing it on the big screen so at least we looked like projs okay so back to the UK fail um I had faced the fact that I won't be able to learn how to play an instrument but I still wanted to create music so I thought can I do something about this or what do I actually need to create music and I made this list needed to create music and I need tones and I need to be able to play these tones exactly when I want to and I need a beat and also to keep the beat then so I started to think about different ways of doing this and I was looking for something that anyone could do without any practice at all and I thought what if this could be music so I started to experiment with an RGB sensor to trigger sounds from a media bank so when pointing the sensor at different colors I could trigger different sounds and I also made this I put the sensor on a turntable and now I could actually paint my own vinyls but I was looking for something even more flexible because if I just wanted to move one single tone I had to repaint the whole one so I thought what if playing with blocks could be music and actually here it is the beat blocks and I will show you how it works so by placing these small blocks on the turntable you trigger different sounds so and every turntable is like its own instrument so here is like the drums here is the the base and this is like the keyboard and so I start with a base so if I if I just Place one block here and press play it sounds like this and if I move it one step it sounds like this and so on I think you get it okay so if I place the blocks like in a stair like this it will obviously sound like this okay and it's the exact same thing over here but with a different [Music] sound okay and of course you can just place them randomly also so something like this maybe for the base yeah pretty nice and if you want a tone to be longer you just add more blocks like this okay and over here is the drums so here is like the kick drum a high hat some other drum some sound and some sound okay but together with a base here I think it would be nice with maybe just four kick drums to start with to create some kind of beat [Music] yeah so now I have like a nice beat I think but maybe we could use also a high hat to this and you can always try to speed one up or slow it down and see how sounds but I think we could use actually even more drums so I play some drown blocks here maybe like [Music] this yeah and over here maybe just one single tone would be nice I think yeah I think I'm quite happy with this one now actually so what we have actually done now is that just by playing with these small blocks we have created a song so thank you very much for listening thank you [Music] [Music]