Culture on Air is a fun experience built in Unity. Fly around the globe in a helicopter, and your Air Tune Curator (ATC) will play the hottest hits from the country you’re hovering over.

I built Culture on Air during my semester abroad at IADE University in Lisbon. Inspired by all the new aspects I could discover in Portuguese culture, I wanted to create something that allowed everyone to dive into different cultures. Having researched the power of music during a previous project - MelodyMates - regional Spotify charts seemed like the perfect choice.

Have a good flight!

MelodyMates is a social network for young music lovers.
Sign up with Spotify, share the songs you love, and discover what your friends are recommending.

Motivation

I often find great new songs that I want to show my friends. What I used to was sending them Spotify links on messengers. However, this was not only a bad user experience, I also had to send it to multiple people individually. Receiving links without a rich preview also meant having to play a song first to see what it was about. Lastly, this broke as soon as a friend was using a different streaming service.

Thus was born the idea to build a platform where friends can connect to discover awesome music. MelodyMates can connect to different music streaming services, and will always show information about shared songs. Furthermore, friends can react and reply to express their feelings about a song.

Connecting Humans

Like many of my projects, MelodyMates is all about fostering meaningful connectings between humans. Communally liked music can contribute to deepening the social connection people feel, exploring more similarities.

, for example, found that “the social context provided by music can strengthen interpersonal closeness by increasing temporal and affective self-other overlaps”.

Technology

I wanted to use this project to experiment with new technologies. Most of MelodyMate’s backend is running on the API layer on top of the database utilized, Fauna. This includes attribute-based access control, database functions, and more. The client accesses this through a GraphQL endpoint.

This client is built on SvelteKit for the Web and being built on Flutter for mobile. It directly communicates with the Spotify API, and eventually, the Apple Music API. This minimizes private user data handling on the server side.

Furthermore, I have built a custom authentication solution, running on Google Cloud Run. It generates asynchronous JWTs based on a user’s authenticated music service access. This token can be independently validated on Fauna.

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