The Noise app, which was created by Michael Crabtree, was inspired by Michael's love of music and his eagerness to share his music with friends. While in the midst of having fun and partying with his friends one night during his first year of college, he noticed that there was no way to have a common music playlist with everyone's music preferences which updates in real time.
This is how the inspiration for Michael's app started. With his excellent work ethic and inquisitiveness, he was able to develop, Noise, and has recently released his app, which is currently in beta. I had the opportunity to speak to him about his app and I wanted to learn more about his work.
Can you tell me about your app, Noise?
Yes, so it is an app that allows you and your friends to share a queue of music. For example, if you want to put on a song, you can add it to the queue and your friend can add his or her songs too. While there are a lot of apps that are out there that have a similar functionality, this app differentiates itself because the app is based on individuals connecting rather than creating a session. The user would connect to Noise with the aid of the music app, Spotify. Also, as I told others about my idea, they told me that I should turn off the music queuing feature, but I asked why do you want me to do that? Getting rid of that feature would go against the function of my app, but it turned out that what people really wanted were recommendations about what music to play from their friends. Let's say I started playing music with you then I can get music recommendations from you. I can get songs from you and then we can share from the same playlist and play music that we both enjoy. This is when I shifted my ideas for the app and that's the moment when I wanted to develop this idea even further.
How does your app work? What types of metrics are you collecting?
The user signs into Noise using his or her Spotify account. You will then open up Noise and see your own queue of music. You can also select other users on the app, which is when Noise receives the other users' music information and Noise's server tells the app by way of an algorithm what songs that other users enjoy that you will most likely enjoy as well. Afterwards, these songs get added to your queue quickly. Also, there are three key metrics that are used in my app which are the users' top artists, top songs and recently played songs. These are the most critical for my app, because this information allows me to know that these three "session objects" are coherent and are composed of songs that the user will enjoy so this will dictate what will get added to the queue.
What background experience did you have that was necessary to create, Noise?
I have worked on developing apps since I was in middle school so I have the foundational knowledge that was necessary to develop Noise. I developed this app independently. In addition to that, I have other app development experience when I worked for a start-up company years ago. I worked as a developer to create an app for your smartphone where you could place your phone while running this app into a special toy and the toy would talk to you and you would be able to play games too. I also have knowledge in many programming languages such as C, C++, Swift, and Objective C, which helped me to build Noise. I built the app using Xcode and I also used dJango as a tool to act as the app's server.
Since you developed this app independently, you must have encountered challenges. Can you describe some of the challenges or any of the bugs that you encountered?
One bug that I have recently solved had to do with duplicate songs. Let's say a user listens to a song multiple times and the song is on the user's top 50 recently played songs then when you look at this user's queue in Noise, I didn't want there to be duplicate songs in that user's playlist. The problem is that if there are duplicates, my app would be checking more data, which can be inefficient so my algorithm takes this scenario into account. Also, since I did not have experience with graphic design or interface design, the original version of my app did not have all the characteristics of other apps such as a tab bar and this was a challenge for me. It took me several iterations in order to be able to add these types of characteristics to my app in order to have an excellent UI/UX for my app.
How will users be able to download your app?
At the moment, there are a few users since the app is still in beta. However, if you want to download my app, please go to my website, http://noiseinnovations.com/, and sign up with your name and email address (you can include a friend's name and email address as well). I will send you a link where you will go to the App Store and type the code that the link will have then you can download Noise afterward. I will release this app to publically to the App Store eventually and it will be a free app to download. Also, my app currently only supports iOS. I am also considering support for other platforms as well as other music streaming services such as Apple Music in the future.
Will you showcase your app at Lehigh?
I plan on showcasing my app next semester (most likely at EUREKA! Ventures Competition) so attendees will be able to get hands-on experience with my app. I'm excited about it!