Ocean was born from a question that drove my postgraduate research at Goldsmiths: how can we design web tools that make music collaboration intuitive and joyful? The result is a collaborative online music-making platform I devised, engineered, and continuously iterated over the past several years. Ocean is used daily by people around the world to make music.
The Platform & Technology: The platform is designed to make music creation accessible, enabling users to drag and drop sounds, sequence beats, and instantly share their tracks. It's built to play to the web's strengths: shareability and the rapid feedback loop between idea and audience. To date, the platform has organically grown to support a community of over 30,000 users worldwide.
Technology Stack:
- Frontend: React, Tailwind, Tone.js (Web Audio API) for all audio synthesis and sequencing.
- Backend: Meteor.js for realtime collaboration and Stripe for payments.
- Database: MongoDB to store user projects and sessions.
- Infrastructure: Hosted on Meteor Cloud, AWS S3 for storing samples and Algolia a search layer.
I focused on playful and fun UX to drive sign ups and engagement in the tool. A key update I made was creating a slimmed down demo version the user could play with without signing up, with a nudge after 30s to sign up and save their work. This increased sign up conversation by 10x.
The Future: AI-Powered Creativity. Looking ahead, I am actively exploring how AI tools like Google Magenta could integrate into Ocean and unlock new creative outcomes for the users. My focus is on leveraging generative models to generate raw audio loops and midi beat patterns to help bridge the gap between ideas and sound. I am also exploring how LLMs can enable a learning platform within the site, giving users information and links to the electronic music canon for reference and inspiration.
A few years ago, I spoke to Music Hackspace about this project's journey. You can check out the video below (and please ignore my lockdown haircut).