The Sound Scan application was influenced by a number of different mediums related to music. Firstly other application related to music were analysed in order to evaluate trends in visual style and interactions.
The SoundHound application, designed for both iPad and iPhone, is a successful application that is well designed and highly useful. It has the fastest music recognition abilities in that it can name a song playing from a speaker in as little as four seconds and is the only application to provide viable singing and humming recognition. The application also displays lyrics of the song, in time, once it is recognised and links straight to the artists social media updates at a tap. This is an incredible progression for technology solving problems that could not have been solved until now. With the music industry's decline due to illegal downloading applications like this may help to reinvigorate it. Now anyone with a smart phone and the app can hear a song for the first time, read the lyrics, see the artwork and purchase the files all at once in an instant. The usefulness of SoundHound and it's ability to help support artists and the music industry was an influence on the initial concept work for Sound Scan. The name SoundHound was also an influence in that I wanted to be self explanatory and memorable.
Visually, SoundHound's logo was an influence on Sound Scan. The italicised name was something I wanted to incorporate in order to imply some movement and energy. The warm orange colour of the logo was also energetic although the S cut out with it's inlaid shadows and many gradients and patterns were more a web design element than something that actually related to music and it's design trends. Sound Scan steers away from this approach to create something contemporary and easily identifiable with today's quality music.
Another application that influenced SoundScan was Triple J's. The application streams the radiostation online and gives you the information on the songs playing and songs played earlier helping to eliminate some of the stress experienced when you miss a song title while driving or doing something else. The visual simplicity of the Triple J application was also an influence. Having "Triple J" with the logo in the header the app provides a direct communication and is visually appealing. The simple interfaces make the app easy to navigate.
Another source of influence was that of printed music magazines. Uncut, Mojo and NME are the most respected and of the highest quality for covering most genres. The use of drop caps occurs across all of them and is something that I maintained in the reviews and interviews sections. The use of gold is another element that I used after seeing how well it look on the pages of uncut. It is stylish yet somewhat reserved. This would help for the app to be as inclusive of all ages of music lovers as possible. Youthful pinks and bright colours are found in magazines such as Blunt that target and almost exclusively young demographic.
Point of Difference
Sound Scan differs from other music mobile applications as it is more of a combination, similar to a mash-up, of different resources that uses current mobile technology to make something as simple as a barcode an interface to all of these resources. This aligns Sound Scan, more than most music applications, in line with not just the future of web design but also the future of print design and paper computing. Most music applications for mobile devices are for music composing and recording or music identifying. Sound Scan is more about investigating products and helping people to purchase music they really like and help to push the bar of quality in music up. Sound Scan in this way may be a very positive product for the future of music.
Review applications for music are scarce. This opportunity is one that may be capitalised on. Metacritic.com's application for film reviews, Movie Finder, is a good example of a review ap. It has a stylish interface design and provides all of Metacritics available information and reviews on films and also helps find theaters and showtimes. It doesn't, however, provide a scanning option that closes the gap between the product and the web further transforming it into a user interface. It also doesn't provide a broad range of reviews and voices. The quality of the reviews may also be doubted as it is online and user contributed. Sound Scan, in this sense, provides a quality and variety of information and resources that far exceeds that of the metacritic app and is turn more reliable and useful.