I was in Bangalore last weekend with my wife Nina who delivered a talk on Music Therapy for Dementia at ARDSICON 2016. During my stay there, I took the opportunity to meet a couple of friends at MusicMuni Labs, a startup that is working on some very cool apps for Music Education in India. This post talks a little about MusicMuni and what they’re up to.
To give you some background, this startup is the brainchild of two of my friends Gopala Koduri and Sankalp Gulati together with their mentor Prof. Xavier Serra and other music technology researchers at the Music Technology Group (MTG) of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The MTG has created several successful startups in the past, and this is one of their newest ventures that employs the research that has been carried out as a part of the CompMusic project among other state-of-the-art music technology research for learning and exploring music of the Hindustani and Carnatic traditions.
The team has so far released two apps for Android – Riyaz and Sarāga, both currently in the beta stage and steadily gaining a user base. This is how the team describes Riyaz which is apparently their main focus at the moment:
“This android application aims to facilitate music learning for beginner to intermediate level music students by making their practice (riyaz) sessions more efficient. This application includes cutting edge music technologies that employ perceptually relevant models to automatically evaluate how well a student is singing compared to a reference music lesson. Students get a fine grained feedback on their singing.”
And Sarāga is described as follows:
“Sarāga is an android application that provides an enriched listening atmosphere over a collection of Carnatic and Hindustani music. It allows Indian art music connoisseurs and casual listeners to navigate, discover and listen to these music traditions using familiar, relevant and culturally grounded concepts. Sarāga includes inclusive designing of innovative visualizations and inter and intra-song navigation patterns that present musically rich information to the user on a limited screen estate such as mobiles. These time synchronized visualizations of musically relevant facets such as melodic patterns, samas locations and sections provides a user with better understanding and appreciation of these music traditions.”
They’re a very early stage startup with a very small and dedicated team, so I wish them all the very best and look forward to exciting updates from them in the future. Do check out their apps on the links I shared above in this blog if you interested in classical music of India. And if you’re looking to do an internship with a passion for music and music technology, they would be happy to hear from you!
