Brainiac Tunes

Brainiac Tunes was our entry for the Mobile App Competition, run by Continuing Education Programs at Parul University in 2022. The app is built around binaural beats: two slightly different tones, one in each ear, which the brain hears as a slow pulse that neither ear is actually playing.

The scope was small. The app does two things: it plays beats to help you get more done, and it lets you post a quote of the day. With so few features, the experience itself had to carry the app, from the first screen to the last.

The features were simple, so we put most of the work into how the app looks and feels: how it greets you, how quickly you reach a beat, and how each session is told apart from the others.

Every beat gets its own card and its own 3D character, so the home screen reads at a glance. Before the home screen, the app asks for a nickname and an avatar, so it can greet you by name from then on.

The whole app is set in Poppins on white, with a few strong colours for the cards (navy, teal and yellow), an indigo for buttons, and soft pastels for the quotes.

The app opens on a meditating pineapple and its motto, #DealWithYourNeurons. Then it asks a single question, what you would like to be called, and lets you choose one of four characters. From then on, the home screen greets you by name.

The home screen is a grid of six cards, one for each beat: Study, Focus, Relax, Sleep, Memory Power and Mood Enhancer. Each card shows the session length and a 3D character that acts out the mood, from a student reading cross-legged to a man asleep at his desk.

Each beat plays a slightly different tone in each ear. Play 200 Hz on the left and 210 Hz on the right, and the brain picks up a slow 10 Hz pulse between them. It only works with headphones, because each ear needs its own tone.

The second half of the app is a Quotes feed. Tap the + button to post a quote of the day. Each quote lands on a pastel card with the quote in large type, a line about it, the date and the name of whoever posted it.

On 26 August 2022, Brainiac Tunes took first rank in the Mobile App Competition. We then published it on the Google Play Store, and the university’s Centre for Continuing Education congratulated us on the launch.

An app on the store still needs people to find it, so we put up posters across the campus, each with a QR code to download the app.

The app has since come down from the Play Store, after a policy update we missed. The project still taught us how to take an app from idea to store, how Play Store policies work, and how to make one design hold up on different devices. The app left the store; what it taught us stayed.