Consumer app
Telia Soundmaker
Telia and the artist Kygo wanted to give anyone a way to make their own music. Neue designed the experience, and we built it in Unity, so every tap responds the instant you make it and putting a track together feels like playing an instrument, not filling in a form.
- Client
- Telia
Services
Domains
Tooling
- Unity
- C#
- Real-time audio
- Mobile
Result
- ( r1 ) Telia Soundmaker shipped: anyone can open it, make their own music in seconds, and save and share it.
- ( r2 ) Built in Unity so it responds in real time, every tap landing as sound and motion with no perceptible delay.
- ( r3 ) Easy enough for a complete beginner to start, and real enough that what they make is worth sharing.
- ( r4 ) Fronted by the artist Kygo and designed with Neue, with MEWB as the engineering partner that made it a working product.
Telia set out to make something new among music apps: a tool for the hit-makers of the future, simple enough that a complete beginner could open it and start making music in seconds. The Norwegian artist Kygo fronted it. The design studio Neue shaped the experience. Our job was to turn that design into a real, working app, one that felt alive the moment you touched it.
Making music is about timing. If a sound arrives a beat after you tap, the magic is gone. The hardest part was not the visuals, it was making every touch produce sound and motion with no perceptible delay, on an ordinary phone, for anyone who picked it up.
The brief was for something a beginner could start with in seconds that still made music worth sharing. Easy and shallow is easy. Easy and deep is the hard part. The app had to welcome a first-timer and still reward someone who kept playing.
Neue had designed an experience that responds immediately and looks inviting. We were the engineering partner who made it exist: the same feel, but running, performant, and shippable in people's hands.
We built Soundmaker in Unity, the engine games use to keep everything responding in real time. A music tool lives or dies on that responsiveness, so we borrowed the technology built for it and put an instrument anyone can play into a phone.
Unity is built for real time: rendering, animation, and audio all responding to input frame by frame, which is exactly what a music app needs and what most app frameworks are not built for. We used it to make Soundmaker react the instant you touch it, every tap landing as sound and motion together, so the app feels like an instrument rather than a screen. The playful, animated feel Neue designed only convinces if it never lags, and a game engine is how you keep that promise.
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A first-timer opens Soundmaker and is making something within seconds, layering sounds and building a track by feel. Underneath that simplicity is a real music tool: the pieces fit together musically, so what a beginner makes actually sounds good, and someone who keeps going can shape something of their own. Then they save it and share it, which is the whole point of a tool for the hit-makers of the future.
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Turning one idea into a product this responsive took three disciplines working as one: game-engine craft for the real-time feel, interaction design for the flow, and a backend to save and share what people made. Kept apart, a project like this fragments. Kept together, a complex idea became simple and genuinely fun to use.
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A music-making app anyone can pick up, fronted by one of Norway's biggest artists.
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