Quick Details

Over the Summer of 2021 I had the incredible opportunity of working with several inspiring mentors within the She is the Music: Connect TogetHER program and USC Thornton School of Music to create a prototype of a product I call Beat Stream.

Beat Stream is a Mac application that grants musicians the ability to add special effects to their live streams without extra cost, video editing skills, or effort.

Utilizing a simple user interface, live closed captioning, and MIDI keyboard controlled graphics, Beat Stream allows musicians of all technical backgrounds to add fun flare to their videos LIVE in real time, to attract more viewers.

  • Role: Product Inventor, Designer, Software Engineer
  • Hardware: Macbook Pro, Impact LX88+ MIDI Keyboard
  • Languages: Swift, Objective-C
  • Platforms: XCode
  • Time Frame: June - August 2021
  • Mentors: Anna Skelsey, Professor Jae Deal

Responsibilities

After watching the creative improvisational talents of musicians on Youtube like Marc Rebillet and Harry Mack, I was inspired to create software that could help other artists add visual pizzaz to their videos.

Youtube has long been the reigning platform for streaming music with billions of users and is a known place for indie artists to get discovered and easily share their music for free. Videos on this platform can range anywhere from a fully produced celebrity music video to a small indie artist’s home recording.

In the digital competition for user attention, indie artists have less of a chance of getting clicks on their videos as compared to high budget content that is algorithmically suggestion-biased. Furthermore, most of these artists don't have the time or money to learn complex visual effects software tools to add visual styling to their home video.

Beat Stream allows musicians to add FX to their Youtube videos live with just a click of a button!

  • Screen wide FX like Snow, Fire, and Rain, grant instant movement and animation to set the mood for next songs.
  • Beat Stream is actually a transparent window that can be clicked and dragged over any content - whether it be video stream, slideshow, empty desktop background, you name it! It works seemlessly with OBS, the leading software that musicians use for streaming their videos.
  • Musicians can choose to connect their MIDI instruments to play FX cued on key presses.
  • Singers can show live closed captioning using Apple’s cutting edge localized speech recognition tech.
  • Youtubers can add their own customized watermark to their video and turn it off and on as they’d like

    • Outcome & Skills Learned

    At the moment Beat Stream was a project entirely coded from scratch by myself! In the future I would like this application to be:

  • A full project with a full team of dedicated disciplines (I am not an FX artist, these are just FX I as a programmer could whip up)
  • Modular – so artists can add their own memes, emojis, and FX
  • Open Source – to keep this application accessible
  • Mobile Compatible -- currently Beat Stream is a transparent Mac application. Meaning it can work with any streaming video encoder (Like OBS, the number one encoder youtubers use) but it doesn’t yet work on mobile phones.