BrainBeats | Devpost

Inspiration

BrainBeats was inspired by our team’s realization of how much time we spend on passive tasks every day. Whether it was folding laundry or washing dishes, we recognized how this time could be better utilized. Additionally, we noted how learning can sometimes be un-engaging and monotonous.

What it does

By pairing educational topics with catchy, memorable tunes, BrainBeats turns mundane tasks and breaks in the day into opportunities for dynamic and effective learning experiences.

How we built it

Ananya and Emma focused on the design aspect of the project while Caleb and Ahad worked on the programming. Ananya created all of our animations from scratch, Emma designed extensive wireframes and mock-ups in Figma, Ahad used Swift for our UI and NextJS for our website, and Caleb used various technologies (Python/Fast API/Suno API) to create a backend server that connected our front end to the APIs.

Challenges we ran into

Caleb was having authentication issues while using an API. This took him nine hours of hard work to resolve.

Emma initially struggled with communicating the design layout with the front-end developer. After talking with Ahad, it was clear that the process of building everything in Figma first was slowing things down. We switched gears and used pencil and paper-drawn wireframes to quickly churn out layouts and speed up our workflow.

Ananya struggled with how tedious the process of animation was, as even 4-second clips were initially taking her several hours to complete. The After Effects UI was overwhelming to navigate, the script kept changing, each and every motion had to be manually adjusted, and some time-consuming sections had to be scrapped due to popular opinion. Fortunately, things became easier over time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’re proud of working quickly to create a novel product from scratch! It was a lot of hard work. We’re also proud of how well we worked together as a team!

What we learned

Ananya learned how to create immersive motion graphics using After Effects and Spline in just 24 hours! Some of the skills she picked up are keyframing, text animation, masking, and audio editing.

Emma learned how to use her design skills to quickly iterate on layouts along with applying design assets across multiple tools. She also learned and practiced hand-off techniques with developers.

Caleb learned he was a lot more capable and resilient than he thought he was, as he was faced with the challenges of reverse engineering an API and manually web scraping.

Ahad grew more familiar with Swift through this project. He also demonstrated a lot of leadership skills and was the most experienced member of our team.

What's next for BrainBeats

We're going to use an open-source music generation model. We'll submit our app to the app store, in the meantime we'll be collecting emails for the launch!