I’ve been trying to build this app for 20 years
Musicologia App
I built my first app as a teenager.
In sophomore year of high school they started teaching us VB6 and I got immediately nerd sniped. I found a copy of Microsoft's Visual Basic 6.0 Programmer's Guide, tore through it in a weekend, and then started doing what every teenager did back then when they first discover software: dragging random controls onto windows and wiring up event handlers until something happened.
It was messy as hell, but I loved it.
Around that same time I was also going through a huge music discovery phase.
At home my parents played ballads, 70s disco, 80s classic rock, and 90s Latin dance music. In school reggaeton was everywhere. Then I became friends with the nerd pack and through them I found metal, punk, emo, and black metal.
So my brain was basically getting hit from all sides at once.
And then there was this The Beatles CD-ROM app my mom had.
I still remember it. You’d open it and it launched this full-screen multimedia experience with all the album covers. You could click one, hear the disc spin up, wait a second, and then get the track list. Click a song and it would start playing, show the cover art, and scroll the lyrics along with it.
That thing absolutely blew my mind.
Not because it was technically advanced by today’s standards. It probably wasn’t. But because it made music feel bigger. It wasn’t just “play track.” It felt like you were entering a little world around the song.
That stuck with me.
So of course I thought: I want to build something like that.
I had no idea what I was doing.
I didn’t know how to properly work with music files. I didn’t know how to extract metadata. I definitely didn’t know how to play mp3s programmatically. So I just grabbed the closest music collection I had access to: a folder full of low-bitrate mp3s of Avril Lavigne's first two albums, with the album art embedded.
Then I either transcribed the lyrics by ear or got some of my nerd friends to help me find them, and started building.
I never got playback working back then.
That part defeated me.
But I did manage to build a main menu, an album listing, a track list window, and a song detail window where you could read the lyrics. Then I’d play the actual mp3s in Winamp and use my little app to browse the songs and sing along.
Very scuffed. Very janky. Very satisfying.
And honestly, that idea never really left me.
Fast forward a couple decades.
Now music is everywhere, and I’m still the kind of person Spotify loves to shame every year with Wrapped. I’m consistently in the top 1% of listeners for some of the artists I follow, and the same itch keeps coming back:
I want a richer experience around the music I love.
Not just a playlist.
Not just a player.
Not just a page with lyrics slapped onto it.
Something immersive. Something with motion, visuals, mood, context. Something that treats a song like a whole little universe instead of just another row in a database.
The difference now is that the tools are finally here.
Now I can actually build the thing teenage me was reaching for.
Lyrics are available. Metadata is available. LLMs are good at helping with research, copy, and pulling together interesting context. Image, audio, and video models can help create visual layers around a song. The browser is ridiculously capable now. We’ve got Three.js, Motion, WebGL, modern audio APIs, and a whole pile of creative tools that would have felt like science fiction back when I was messing around in VB6.
So I finally stopped romanticizing the idea and started building it.
That project is Musicologia.
It’s a personal listening archive / immersive music experiment / excuse for me to make weird, beautiful pages about songs I love.
The idea is pretty simple: take tracks that matter to me and build a custom experience around them. Music, visuals, lyrics, motion, writing, mood, context. Not as a generic music app trying to catalog everything, but as a more intentional space for songs that actually mean something.
Basically: what if each song got treated like it deserved its own little corner of the internet?
That’s what I’m chasing.
The first release is live now at musicologia.de.
It’s still early. Still evolving. Still very much the beginning. But it’s real, and that feels good. This has been sitting in some corner of my brain since I was a teenager, and now there’s finally a version of it out in the world.
If you love music and wish the web did a better job of making room for obsession, memory, atmosphere, and feeling around the songs that matter to you, check it out:
Would also love to hear what people think. This project is deeply personal, but that’s kind of the point.