So you can’t read music. Or carry a tune. No big deal. If you’ve always dreamed of making music but can barely tell the difference between a treble clef and an ampersand, all is not lost. A new app, called Geometric Music, requires no real musical skill beyond making sounds and understanding shapes.

To say Geometric Music produces actual melodic tunes is a little misleading. The app was originally dreamt up by Gaëtan Libertiaux and Gaël Bertrand, co-founders of interactive design Superbe with a deep fascination of beat-boxing. The guys always wanted to learn the skill, but were too lazy to practice. (Le sigh.) Geometric Music is their answer to that.

The app works like ultra-simple sample-production software, allowing you to create layered beats. But while complex programs will drown you in buttons and knobs, Geometric Music only uses shapes to dictate how something sounds. Every noise you make is translated into one of four shapes (circle, triangle, square or hexagon), and you manipulate those shapes to change the rhythm, speed and volume. Think of it as tapping into a digitally-enabled form of shaped-based synesthesia.

It might sound odd, but it turns out shapes are a fairly intuitive way to communicate musical ideas. Music might feel ephemeral, but it has edges. Have you ever heard a song and instantly imagined what it might look like? Geometric Music is makes that notion concrete by directly translating what you see on screen to what you hear.

To channel your inner Kanye, you start by recording a sound, whether that be a clap, a burp or whistle. From there you choose your shape based on the sequence of the beat you’re looking for. Each shape as its own rhythm; choose a circle and you’ll hear your sound once, a triangle is three times, a square four times and a hexagon six times. The concept is easier to grasp once you watch your sound travel around the edges of the shape.

The size of the shape determines the tempo (the smaller the shape, the faster the beat). And the shape’s orientation dictates its dynamics (moving it up on the screen increases the volume, down decreases) and how you’ll hear it (you can move the shape left and right to impact the stereo). Added to all that is the ability to reverse and distort your sounds.

Geometric Music

Right now, you can’t save your recordings. Anything you create dissolves into the creative ether as soon as you begin a new track. The designers plan to incorporate a saving functionality on the next version of the app along with filters to add variety to the sounds. So as the app evolves, it’ll be easier to make more sophisticated beats.

The app is a little bit addicting, if not an entirely efficient way to edit music. Even with practice, it’s hard to produce a controlled sample. “We don't really care about the technical vision itself or about creating the most efficient tool,” says Libertiaux. And fair enough. Geometric Music is more about leveraging a new kind of interaction and visualization to teach a hard-learned skill. The big question is, can shapes help us to learn music without actually understanding the technicalities music? The designers seem to think so. "Everybody is creative, it's the environment in which we live that tends to kill our creativity," says Libertiaux. "That's what we want to achieve with the app, to make people realize that they are musicians too."