Beatboxes

The work and its context

Beatboxes is Art Blocks project 145 on the contract at 0xa7d8d9ef8d8ce8992df33d8b8cf4aebabd5bd270, on Ethereum mainnet, credited to Zeblocks. The index records 841 invocations against a maximum of 841, a declared dependency of aframe@1.2.0, an aspect ratio of 1.77, the Playground category and a licence label of NFT License with no link ¹. The collection page describes an Art Blocks 500 release in the Playground category, a fixed edition of 841 unique artworks, and lists twelve attributes, from Tempo, Bass and Lead to Palette, Shape dominance and Light ².

Zeblocks is not one person. The studio's About page names two people, Guillaume and Sebastian. It describes Guillaume as an arts and multimedia graduate and former agency owner, and Sebastian as the developer "behind Zeblocks" who built its interactive work ³. The mint description uses "our" throughout ¹. This package keeps the single credit the platform records while noting that it stands for a duo.

A Beatbox is a room. Each token builds a closed box 100 units square and 50 high, lights it, fills it with 128 striped objects (half-spheres, boxes, open cylinders, hexagonal slabs and tetrahedra), and composes an eight-step electronic loop to play inside it. The viewer stands in the room and can walk around with the keyboard, or with a headset in virtual reality. When the music plays, every object's stripes pulse with one band of the sound's spectrum ¹⁴. The mint description calls the series "fully immersive, virtual reality, audiovisual generative art" and says the goal was "an environment where you can escape your reality for a moment" ¹².

Beatboxes followed Zeblocks' first project, Unigrids, which the studio says launched in January 2021 and was later featured in a Sotheby's sale ⁵. Its program is a 3D scene and a synthesiser at once, and how it behaves depends on the viewer starting it: the room is silent and still until the spacebar is pressed ¹⁴.

Conception and development

The studio's own project page gives the fullest account of the work's origin. It says the idea came "just after Guillaume was looking at Oculus VR devices for his son's birthday" ⁵. It says the pair understood that such work "would not be that suitable for conventional media like canvas or prints" but believed the future would bring "many more ways to enjoy and experience art" ⁵. The same page calls the project "definitely challenging" and describes Beatboxes as a response to the attention Unigrids received ⁵.

On technology, the page says Beatboxes uses A-Frame, "a web framework for building virtual reality experiences", and that the studio believed it was "among the first to build a generative art project with it" ⁵. It adds that the beats are "more advanced" than those in Unigrids, built with the Web Audio API, and that "all the beats are once again 100% on-chain" ⁵. The first claim is the studio's own and is not tested here. The second is borne out by the program, which synthesises every sound from oscillators and generated noise and loads no audio file ¹.

The project page makes a stronger claim: that Beatboxes are "the first fully immersive, virtual reality, audiovisual generative art" on Ethereum ⁵. The mint description as it survives in the index uses the same sentence without the word "first" ¹. This package records the claim as the studio's and does not assess it.

No interview, development log or dated announcement was found. The indexed artist_interview field is null, and the studio's home page is a gallery of links to its three projects and two press mentions ¹⁵. The mint description ends with a practical warning that A-Frame "is currently not optimized for ios mobile and safari browser" ¹. The construction section identifies one concrete way that warning could matter for the sound.

How the work was constructed

The program is the script field of the index record for project 145, retrieved by exact slug and confirmed by the composite identifier. It is 29,709 bytes in one part and its SHA-256 digest is 99873a69797130ec0ec189317870118a79e73759d5e02fe7ec4034eb03e93080 ¹. The live renderer serves an inline script of the same length with the same digest and loads A-Frame 1.2.0, which reports three.js revision 125, from a public CDN ⁴. The program was read in full. No artist code is reproduced here.

Randomness comes from a three-shift generator seeded from the first sixteen characters of the hash and returning one of 1,000 values per draw. It is written as a small class and parses the hash without an explicit base, which JavaScript resolves as hexadecimal because of the 0x prefix ¹. This batch found the same arithmetic in Return by Aaron Penne, released three months earlier, and in Mental pathways, released two months later; the comparison is recorded in the research notes. The program creates two separate instances of it from the same hash, one for sound and one for the room, so the two streams begin with the same numbers ¹. One consequence is a coupling nobody would guess from the traits. The first draw of both streams sets the palette on one side and the lead instrument's octave on the other, so the palette constrains the lead octave. Every one of the 110 Northernlight tokens plays its lead in the same octave, and no palette spans more than two of the three possible octaves ⁶.

The sound is built first. Tempo is drawn between 100 and 180 beats per minute and published in four bands, Andantino, Moderato, Allegro and Vivace. The root note falls between 2 and 10 semitones below A440. Bass and lead each pick one of several interval sets, published as the Bass and Lead traits ¹. Before any instrument is voiced, the program fills three seconds of stereo white noise with the sound generator, one draw per sample, for later use by hats and snares ¹. That noise buffer consumes 192,000 draws at the 32,000-sample-per-second rate the program requests. Every audio decision after it depends on the browser honouring that rate. A reimplementation run against all 841 hashes reproduces the published Bass boosted and Background Sound traits 841 of 841 at 32,000 samples per second. At 44,100 the matches fall to 443 and 397, and at 48,000 to 431 and 427, which is roughly chance ⁶. Where a browser does not honour the requested rate, a Beatbox would play a different kick drum and hat from the one its metadata describes. This may be part of what the mint description's warning about Safari refers to, but that is an inference, and this package did not test Safari itself.

Six instrument voices are synthesised: a kick (or, on the 429 tokens marked Bass boosted, a three-oscillator sub-bass that also changes the kick pattern's variation rate from 35 to 8 per cent), a snare, a closed hat or a click (the Background Sound trait), a filtered noise percussion voice, a lead and a detuned pad ¹⁶. An eight-step sequencer schedules them, varying the hat, kick, percussion and lead with fixed probabilities on every pass, so the loop never repeats exactly ¹.

The room is built from the second generator. A weighted draw picks one of ten palettes. A shuffle assigns colour pairs to the cylinders, hexagons and pyramids, and 20 per cent of tokens get a coloured border on every object ¹. A shape-dominance draw either weights all five shape types equally (published as None) or gives 45 per cent to one of half-sphere, cylinder, hexagon or pyramid. Boxes are never dominant ¹. Rotation and size-ratio schemes follow, then a global size divisor of 2, 1.5 or 1, published as Small, Medium and Large ¹. Each of the 128 objects is then placed in a cell of a 10 by 10 grid on the floor or on the ceiling, where it hangs upside down. A collision search moves it to the nearest free cell ¹. Across the edition, between 28 and 73 of each room's 128 objects hang from the ceiling ⁶. A reimplementation of the whole room sequence reproduces all seven room traits on all 841 tokens. It also predicts the exact count of each shape type in three rooms, which matched the live scene on every count ⁶⁴.

Sound drives the image through a single analyser with 256-point resolution, which yields exactly 128 frequency bands, one per object ¹. On every frame, each object reads its own band. Half-spheres and boxes show one value that decays slowly, cylinders and hexagons scroll a 50-step history of their band along their stripes, and pyramids do the same at half the rate ¹. The point light, fixed or a moving ball, can also take its intensity from the overall loudness ¹. Without sound, the analyser is silent and the stripes stand still.

Controls come from A-Frame and the program. The camera carries A-Frame's standard look and WASD components, which respond to WASD or the arrow keys, and the program clamps the viewer inside the walls ⁷¹. The spacebar toggles the music and animation; on screens narrower than 1,024 pixels a tap does the same, and in VR a controller button does it ¹. The renderer page fills the browser window, so the recorded aspect ratio of 1.77 is not enforced: the observation window was taller than it was wide ⁴.

The mint

The first token, invocation 0, was minted on 18 August 2021 at 16:08:31 UTC, ten days before the sale ⁶. The index records activation on 28 August at 02:58:07 UTC and a start time of 19:00:00 UTC the same day ¹. Invocation 1 was minted 42 seconds after that start, at 19:00:42 ⁶. The collection page shows a release date of 29 August 2021, which is the 19:00 UTC start rendered in a browser ten hours ahead of UTC ².

The remaining 840 tokens sold in 18 minutes and 14 seconds. Thirty-two were minted in the first ten minutes and the last at 19:18:14 UTC, which is also the recorded completion time ⁶¹. The duration uses the indexed start and the final mint as endpoints. The shape of that curve, with a slow first ten minutes and then a rush, is what a declining-price auction would produce, but no dated source for the sale terms was found, so this package does not assert one. The index's current price field reads 4.2 ETH ¹. It is not known whether that was a starting price, a resting price or a fixed price. Invocation order and timestamp order agree throughout, and 31 instants carried more than one mint ⁶.

At retrieval the 841 tokens were spread across 435 addresses ⁶. The index does not label artist or reserved mints, and the early timing of invocation 0 is not treated as evidence of either.

Copyright and licensing

The index records the artwork licence label as NFT License, with a null link ¹. The collection page's expanded details list no licence field ². The phrase is the name of a licence published by Dapper Labs at nftlicense.org, whose summary lets an owner use the art for personal non-commercial purposes, display it on verified marketplaces and third-party sites, and commercialise merchandise up to $100,000 in annual revenue. It forbids modifying the art, using it to market third-party products, and attempting to acquire intellectual property in it ⁸. Nothing in the project record links the label to that document or to any version of it. The operative terms for Beatboxes therefore remain unverified, and the association is recorded as a likely reading of a bare label, not as an established grant.

No licence statement appears in the program, so the code's own terms are unknown ¹. A-Frame, which the renderer loads at view time and without which nothing displays, is described on its documentation site as licensed under the MIT Licence ⁷. The three.js library bundled inside A-Frame was not separately examined. The sounds are synthesised by the program, not sampled, so no separate audio rights arise from recorded material ¹.

If the NFT License reading were confirmed, it would matter for presentation because it prohibits modification. A cropped or recoloured still, or a re-scored video, would then need a separate decision. Until the terms are confirmed, this package treats the question as open.

Close reading of examples

Four rooms were chosen to span palette, dominant shape, light and tempo: the AB5D holding, a bordered Vivace room with a moving light ball, a pastel room with no dominant shape, and a Blacklight room dominated by hexagons. Each was opened in the official renderer with the browser pane displayed ⁹⁴. The selection is purposive, not representative.

Beatboxes #126 (token 145000126, held by an address in the AB5D linked-wallet set ¹⁰) was observed for about two minutes. Published traits are Blackwhite, Pyramid dominant, Static variable intensity light, Allegro, Medium size, no border ⁹. On load it is a black room seen from the centre: tall cylinders banded in grey and white rise on the right, a row of low tetrahedra with white diagonal stripes runs along the far floor, and more shapes hang in the dark above. Before the music started, the scene was still: the canvas signature was identical across 14 seconds and the audio analyser read only a floor of 18 across all 128 bands ⁴. The tempo read live as 142 beats per minute, the value the reimplementation predicts for this hash ⁴⁶. A key press delivered by the automation tool arrived with an empty key code and did nothing. That is a tool limitation, not a fault in the work. A keypress event carrying the Space code, the event the program listens for, started the loop. Over the next 52 seconds, 53 of 53 one-second samples were distinct. The analyser sum ranged from 336 to 12,362, and the room light's intensity moved between 0.008 and 0.406, dimming and flaring with the loudness ⁴. On screen, the grey cylinders fade and brighten band by band while the pyramids' white stripes flicker. It reads as a dark hall of speakers. Holding W moved the viewer 15.5 units forward, and the left arrow a further 9.7 units sideways, bringing a close cluster of striped pyramids into view. A second Space press stopped the loop: the next two samples, three seconds apart, were identical and the analyser fell back to 18 ⁴.

Beatboxes #325 (token 145000325) is Nightsky, Hexagon dominant, bordered, with a moving light ball variable in intensity, at the fastest tempo band ⁹. It was observed for about 56 seconds. The room is near-black violet. Tall deep-purple cylinders with peach bases and stripes stand at the edges, flat peach hexagon slabs lie on the floor, and small pink-lined tetrahedra and outline boxes hang overhead. The live counts included 56 hexagonal slabs, as the reimplementation predicts ⁴⁶. Tempo read 178. With the music running, 43 of 43 samples were distinct, and the analyser ranged from 18 to 13,133 ⁴. The light ball's position, read every six seconds, crossed the whole room: from (22, 15, 42.7) to (20.2, 39.9, -46.1) to (-33.7, 3.9, 47.5) and on, bouncing off the walls at a steady speed ⁴. As it passes, pools of violet light sweep across the peach slabs. This is the most kinetic kind of Beatbox: the light moves continuously, and the stripes move only with the sound.

Beatboxes #294 (token 145000294) is Candyland with no dominant shape, a static light, Large size, Andantino at 118 beats per minute ⁹⁴. It is the brightest of the four: a saturated magenta column, mint-green hexagon slabs, pink tetrahedra and pale lilac half-spheres in a dark plum room. The live shape counts were 24 boxes, 27 cylinders, 23 hexagons, 28 tetrahedra and 26 half-spheres, exactly the reimplementation's prediction, and close to the even split the None trait implies ⁴⁶. Once playing, its five one-second samples showed only two distinct states, the second held for four seconds; the frame sampling does not settle whether its stripes were momentarily idle or changing below the sampling grid's resolution ⁴.

Beatboxes #89 (token 145000089) is Blacklight, Hexagon dominant, Vivace at 171 beats per minute ⁹⁴. The room is almost black. Violet edges trace the hexagon slabs, small hot-pink boxes float in space, and grey tetrahedra line the far floor. Its live counts, 56 hexagons, 24 cylinders, 20 tetrahedra, 16 half-spheres and 12 boxes, again matched the reimplementation exactly ⁴⁶.

Sound in all four was measured, not heard. The page's audio context reported running at load, and the analyser carried a strong spectrum while playing and a flat floor when stopped. The agent has no speaker output of its own, so no one listened to these rooms for this package ⁴.

Significance and limitations

Beatboxes is distinctive less for any one image than for how it couples sound and space. There are 128 objects because the analyser has 128 bands; each object is one frequency band made visible, and the way it shows that band (a single decaying level on half-spheres and boxes, a scrolling history on cylinders and hexagons) is a design decision readable in the room ¹⁴. Without the music it is a still, dark room. Starting the music is the viewer's act, and in 2021 the studio framed that act as walking into a club you own ⁵¹.

The research also exposes two properties that matter for anyone presenting it. The published sound traits are true only when the browser runs audio at 32,000 samples per second. Elsewhere the same hash plays a different kick and hat roughly half the time, so the metadata and the music can disagree ⁶. And the same number chooses both the palette and the lead instrument's octave, which ties colour to register across the edition in a way the published traits do not reveal ⁶.

The generator arithmetic it shares with other projects in this batch fits a picture of a small toolkit circulating among Art Blocks developers in 2021 ¹. Its studio's claim to be first with immersive VR generative art is recorded here as the studio's own claim ⁵.

Unresolved research questions:

1. What were the sale terms: a fixed price, or a declining auction ending at or starting from the 4.2 ETH now in the index?
2. Does the NFT License label refer to the Dapper Labs NFT License, and if so which version? The record gives no link.
3. What sample rate do current Safari and iOS browsers actually use for this renderer, and how many tokens then play different music from their metadata?
4. Was invocation 0, minted ten days early, an artist or test mint?
5. How does the work behave in a headset today? No VR device was available and the VR path was not tested.
6. Did the pair intend the coupling between palette and lead octave, or is it a by-product of seeding two generators identically?