Challenge

Most NFT projects are a simple assembling of transparent image layers to create different art combinations. This is a fairly straightforward process for the most part - just make sure things stack in the right order and are in the right place and the code to generate your collection is not too complex.

But what about making songs that sound good? Given a set of base stems with different rarities and rules generating audio that sounds like a song, let alone a good song, is way harder.

On top of that, the Blocktones team wanted a unique mint experience that would risk a lot of complexity and high gas prices.

Solution

Blocktones is a multimedia experience based in the metaverse. The genesis collection involved a deeply integrated lore-based storyline featuring an evil AI from the future called AIMEE.

Generative music that actually sounds good

Each NFT has a 3D visual component with rules affecting the corresponding audio. To generate both the audio and visual elements of the art we had to develop a custom art generation engine from scratch. We took into account preset rules around rarities, exclusion rules and matching between both audio and visual elements. However generating the audio went a step further - with the help of the founding team's experience in the music industry, we developed a probabilistic rule engine that took into account features of each audio stem to determine how best to match them with other stems and create appealing tracks.

Designing the ultimate mint experience

Blocktones had a complex mint set up. Special partnerships with various projects, a complex whitelisting strategy, a multi-phase mint with different pricing and restrictions at each tier, and a browser-based 3D metaverse experience created a highly complex environment. We needed to ensure that there were no security holes at all, that minting went smoothly for everyone and that gas were as low as possible despite the many conditions.

Building the future of on-chain music royalties

Blocktones imagines a future where music producers and artists can share their work directly with consumers and be rewarded for it without losing most of it to record labels and distributors. For the Blocktones live-stream launch event, we built a proof-of-concept of this future. Along with a trait explorer, we created a digital royalty-signing feature that allowed audio IP holders to authorise the live-streaming of their track through an encoded message and be paid for doing so.

Outcome

This unique, complex and multi-faceted project allowed us to flex our wide range of services. We helped the Blocktones team implement their Ethereum smart contracts, generative music and 3D art, off-chain services, marketing integrations, and metaverse integrations. Ultimately, Argon team members drove the project to a successful outcome - with nobody having issues during the mint and achieving extremely low gas prices.

We’re proud to have helped shape the infrastructure for on-chain creator royalties and excited to see how this space evolves.