Soundview NYC is a mobile app and web platform for the exploration and discovery of serendipitous musical moments around New York City. It allows users to leave their sonic footprint on the physical landscape, add spatial dimension to playlists, find stories left behind by other users, and uncover the hidden musical histories of the neighborhoods of New York through the augmentation of sound with place.
how it works
Soundview lets you create custom playlists of songs and augment them to specific locations in New York City, and reveals user-generated playlists one song at a time as you walk through the city. When you are at a specific location, a notification will pop up on your phone alerting you that there is a musical memory tied to the place you are in.
Tools
Built with Python, Twilio, HTML/CSS, Javascript, Sketch, and Illustrator.
background
This project emerged out of a definitive time and place; I had just moved to New York from Austin in July to start graduate school, and found an apartment far from most of my friends and in a new neighborhood (Bed-Stuy) in Brooklyn. I found myself inspired by the near-constant raucous block parties happening all around me, and by the variety and prevalence of pop music blasting from the cars and storefronts down Broadway. I began taking brief recordings on my iPhone in earnest of clips of songs I would hear while walking around my neighborhood and noting the time and exact location.
I wanted to somehow document the experience of living in Brooklyn and develop a profile of its deeply embedded musical history with a map of its acoustic environment. I believe in the sense of place that music can impart, and in the power of narratives - both historical and personal.
Photo by Will Steacy
Initial user journey
Design process
In order to make this series of loosely connected ideas a reality, I utilized several methods of ideation and validation through user interviews and research, iterative prototyping, and agile development. The concept for Soundview went through several phases of testing and validation before I arrived at the final solution.
Guiding Questions
My initial questions for this project were:
- Are people interested in place-making through sound?
- How can you create a way for people to tie music to specific places and to discover new sounds?
- Can you appreciate music on a deeper level if it’s tied to a physical landscape in some way?
- Can an app make visible the relationship between spaces and sites, the material and the immaterial
- How can geolocation features be utilized in playlist discovery?
Interviews
I interviewed people about their music listening habits and associations. Insights gathered:
- People were fairly divided between using streaming radio services like Pandora, and those who liked to have more control
- over their music choices and create their own playlists.
- Many said they would seek out information about artists and songs they liked
- Many people had stories about family and friends who would to great lengths to seek out places that have been iconified in popular music and make pilgrimages to places that had
been immortalized in music (Graceland, Abbey Road, etc.) - People have strong emotional ties to music, and those emotional ties often had a strong connection to a specific place and time.
Hearing all these personal narratives led me to refocus slightly on the existing culture of mixtapes. In my experience, mixtapes and playlists are very much driven by a sense of wanting to capture a specific temporal and spatial moment - something that’s true even in the move from cassette tapes to digital playlists on Spotify and iTunes.
USER PERSONAS
From these interviews, I developed a set of three main user personas: The Newcomer, The Music Lover, and The Storyteller.
First Prototype
The first prototype consisted of a web app that tracked the user’s latitude and longitude, and activated location-specific modals when the user entered specific geographic range. A friend created a playlist of songs that each had a story and an address that was specific to that song, which I used as my main source of content for testing out my application.
Left: Rough sketches of screens that were used to build out the first prototype.
FIRST WALKTHROUGH
The screens below details the process of logging in, opting into notifications from Soundview, and an introduction to how it works. (Click to enlarge.)
Below, the process of receiving a notification modal for a story, story detail, and a map of the auto-generated playlist of songs that the user has discovered in their physical environment.
Things that were considered in the development of this prototype: in wanting to create a tool to encourage exploration, is the user taking an active or passive role? Are they actively seeking out the content by intentionally exploring? Or is it happening in the background while they go about their daily lives? Also, does the platform need to be its own entity, or does it need to be built on an existing streaming service for music licensing and legal purposes? What are the technical constraints of the geolocation features I want to implement?
Taking the app into the wild with a focus group
User testing
The next step was testing the prototype I built with other users. This resulted in feedback that mainly focused on the tension between the intent of wandering and serendipitous discovery while exploring your physical environment. The limitations of the prototype I built also meant that the user had to have the web app open at all times in order to receive the notifications as they were walking around, meaning notifications were frequently missed. And having to watch the website on your phone constantly for the modals was counterintuitive to the core goal of encouraging exploration and meandering in the city - which is hard to do if you’re constantly staring down at your phone.
Solution
After evaluating my feedback and my initial goals, I decided to take a different direction, and switched over to an SMS-based system over the mobile modals because it was a medium that people were already very familiar and comfortable with. It doesn’t require constant monitoring of one’s phone, and also has the added side effect of leaving a record of the past texts picked up, creating a de facto playlist in your records. Text notifications were also less likely to be missed, and do not require the user to have to web app open at all time.
Right: New and updated user journey incorporating text-based system
Final Prototype
The final prototype is a web app and accompanying SMS app. Much like the first prototype, the web app allows users to sign up, opt into granting Soundview their location data, create custom playlists through a form submission, augment them with location data, and details the process of discovering others’ playlists in the physical environment. The information users enter when creating playlists is then pieced into SMS-sized messages and fed into a custom chat bot that uses Python and Twilio to generate text messages. When the user opts in, the app tracks the user's physical coordinates and sends a text message when they have entered a location that has been previously augmented with the information.
Below are the final user journey boards detailing the onboarding process, creating a playlist, and receiving texts from the app when they were entered a physical location augmented with users' stories. (Click to enlarge.)
Final Thoughts
Soundview ended up taking multiple forms over the course of its development through many rounds of iterative prototyping and constant user-testing; part of the reason for this was the challenge of taking a highly conceptual and emotion-driven idea for a project and turning it into a product for a broad group of people. The first prototype had a more social aspect, where users could view and explore other's playlists, and have the app compile their discovered songs and stories into an auto-generated playlist they could download. The second prototype deviated from those extra features in favor of a more serendipitous and personal discovery system. Future iterations of Soundview would focus on the social aspect, and bringing in a wide variety of different voices to contribute to the project.
This project emerged from a very personal and hyper-specific place: that of wanting to capture what was, in retrospect, a fleeting sensory experience. I realize now that my ultimate goal was not merely to pay homage the musical culture that pervaded my little corner of Brooklyn, but to also capture the emotional journey of being a newcomer to a big city, and the idea of music as a way to establish a sense of place and familiarity in new surroundings.