Pasquale D’Silva vividly remembers being forced to take music lessons as a kid. “It was just regurgitating music that was written 300 years ago,” he says. “It was not very creative, and I quit.” Keezy, the colorful sound sampler app for iPhone is D’Silva’s playful rebuke to formal instruction.
“At first it was us just recording fart sounds into the board and then after playing with it for a while we realized you can make beats and rhythms and you can start making music with it.” says, Pasquale D’Silva, the 25-year-old cocreator and designer.
Keezy takes minimal design to the max. Tap on any of the eight colored tiles and start making your own beats. You can record your own voice, your dog’s bark, the sound of pots and pans banging together, or even plug in a keyboard to amp up the quality. “I decided to separate all of the samples with color–which I think is the most sensitive of our senses–not with a bunch of grids and shapes,” say D’Silva.
His intuition to represent sound through color stems from a condition called color synesthesia, which D’Silva describes as a cross-wiring of senses. “For me, it is when I associate anything with color: names, faces, sounds. Anything that triggers a sense can often trigger color.” He relates the sound of a heater to a “ghosty peachy pink,” dogs as “brown and purple,” and his partner on Keezy, Jake, as “red and black.”
Though very basic, D’Silva hopes to grow Keezy into a new tool for making music. Programs like Logic, Ableton, and even Fruity Loops are a few of the most popular prosumer apps currently being used to record, loop, and playback rhythms, but D’Silva hopes to blur the lines between prosumer and consumer and make Keezy an app for musicians and enthusiasts alike.
