MusicWalker

Creativity

Instead of complex music composing software, we make Music Walker simple, and fun. Music Walker utilizes the concept of crowdsourcing: music made by everyone! Music Walker is a game-like website: you can literally walk your avatar around the music world!

Product Design

Music Walker is a web app that allows you to create music with friends by moving your avatar to step on blocks with notes defined by you. We also offer different choices of musical instruments and a few cool beats. We expect a few people to work together on one single song to maximize the fun!

Target Market Identification

People who are interested in music and the internet.

Impact

Encourage people to learn about music. Give people a sense of satisfaction. Give people happiness!

Inspiration

The project, Music Walker, is inspired by Chrome Music Lab and many research papers on how crowdsourcing can empower creative work.

How we built it

We used React for our frontend, with a music library called Tone.js. We utilized Material UI for an aesthetic yet convenient-to-build UI. We used the sound effect provided in the Tone.js library to achieve a music playing experience. For the backend, we implemented it with Express.js, with data saved in MongoDB.

Challenges we ran into

We found the design of the product itself to be challenging. We spent a long time deciding what this project should be like. For example, should we have monophonic synthesizers or polyphonic ones? The avatar animation is also challenging. We want it to be walking naturally while fitting perfectly into the music-creating experience. Lastly, we found the Tone.js library we are using to be hard to comprehend sometimes. We spent some time figuring out how to make it polyphonic and performant without lagging.