Building a Music App That Speaks to Artists — The NaadSadhana Story with Sandeep Ranade

0:00I've had offers to buy out the app and the only question I ask them every time is what feature would you add next? They had no answer. It now truly seems that I'm the only person who is passionate enough to evolve this app in the way that I care about in the sense that an artist, a performing artist cares about. Welcome to launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and today I'm excited to bring you the developer

0:23behind the Apple design award-winning music app, Nod Satana, Sandep Ranade.

0:32Sandep, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on your show. It's such a pleasure. Yeah, this is this is going to be really fun. Uh it actually wasn't very long ago that we met for the first time and uh we did a live version of launched that wasn't recorded. Um and it was with uh Raja who makes Lumi and Ky and a bunch of other apps. So it was kind of a more of a a panel kind of thing. Um, and after that I was like, we have to get you on the show proper and and talk about talk about your app and your experience because it's uh it's super cool. So, I'm I'm super pumped

1:06about this. I'm very excited. I had a great time talking to you that day and I wanted to sort of continue the conversation. So, this is perfect. And uh watchers of the the video version of the podcast might notice that uh I'm in a dark room right now. And that is because you're you're coming uh live from somewhere in India. Uh so hopefully I will have the energy level that you've come to expect from launch. Not that this is this intense podcast. Maybe you'll get a loopy version

1:36of me. I'm not really sure, but it'll be fun no matter what. Unplugged Charlie. Exactly. Exactly. But before we get into Unplugged Charlie, uh I want to introduce everybody to who you are. So the questions I always ask everybody to kick off this show is uh where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do and then let's talk about what your career was and what led you up to Nad Satana. Sure. So I'm from Pune uh which is a city close to Mumbai in India and I do have a formal education in computer science. So I did my bachelor's of computer science here in

2:18Pune and then I went to do a master's in computer science from Johns Hopkins University in America in Baltimore. I worked at Microsoft. I worked at several startups then at Google and so I have a career in the US that spanned about 12 years and then I moved back to India. I quit my job and my wife was at Apple. She quit her job. We moved back to India. It'll be 11 years in January that we've

2:45moved back. And so we moved back to do something that we were interested in that we wanted to do. And uh we started a couple of ventures and then came the two biggest startups of our lives which is our twin boy and girl and then the app started a couple of days after they were born. So it was like having three kids at once. Oh my goodness. You said you started a couple of ventures before

3:11that like you were you came back and you were kind of trying to to start a startup on of your own. Yes. So I was always fascinated by the interview process especially at Google and the way that they Well, yeah. The interview process at Google was sort of famous, right, for being Yes. kind of wild and weird questions and stuff like that. Exactly. But I was more more interested in the people that didn't make the cut and why because everybody that applied on paper looked amazing but it was the little things that sometimes threw them off or they sort of went into a rabbit hole and they

3:50couldn't get themselves out of it or there were some personality issues or ego issues. And so I was trying to figure out is there a way that these things can be changed can be learned and practiced and changed so that they can get into Google or Stanford or Harvard or wherever they want to go. And so that began a journey of discovering and figuring out what the what the most important skill set is and I realized that this has never been taught to me formally and many of them I had to learn the hard way. So I called the company endless evolution because that is what I wanted it

4:28to be. And uh there were things like how to be creative on demand, how to make good decisions while still having ambiguity in your data or how to work well in a team, how to be poised under stress and in difficult situations, how to be loved, how to be charismatic. So all of the things that people tell us right that these are the most important thing things for success but are never really formally taught. So I made small algorithms that can be practiced individually and then put together and some of them are biohacks, some of them are neurological hacks,

5:02some of them are just practicing techniques over and over again till they become second nature. And so that that I started when I came back. I I took an year off because it has been a a long uh hardworking career so to speak. And so I took an year off. It took that kind of time to sort of design and build my house here and then idea started coming in and that I did for a couple of years. Was this like a course then or was this like a an app or a website like what are we It was more corporate training. So we did this for larger smaller to larger companies and their either their

5:41engineering teams or their corporate team the their executive teams or everybody combined. So companies would bring you in. Yes. It would be like an off-site event like a day off and then we would go to some resort somewhere and then we would train them or we could go on onto their company premises and then hold these trainings and these it was part of it was instruction part of it was practice a large part of it was practice and now this was a departure from what you were doing at all these companies right you were you were writing code so I started with kernel programming I was in the Windows kernel team, the most veteran team in Microsoft. And

6:23it was a very interesting learning experience. I bet I did operating systems, distributed systems, storage, file systems. So all the low-level sort of systems level stuff. Then I was doing large data pipelines, analytics, a lot of sort of map reduce kind of stuff. So I did dduplication. We did a storage appliance at a startup that I was doing. So it was a lot of different things. Now, none of those sound like either a consumer app nor musicbased. So, it all started in 2017. I think the later part of the year because there was a student of music. So, before I get into that, I am also a Hindustani classical singer and I've been training since I was very young perhaps 6

7:14years of age. Can you explain what that means? So Hindustani classical music is a genre which is the north of India and because there is karnatic classical music which is the south of India but it is all classical music and this is Raa based so there is a lot of improvisation lot of spontaneity much of it is created on the spot so live performances are all spontaneous and so I studied my guru was Padma bibush and sangeit martan panditas and I've been doing that for a And so I was also teaching music for a while since 2005 actually. So you were you were teaching that on the side as like a fun kind of hobby thing. Exactly. And so there was a student

7:58of music who had seen me live in concert and she said please help me. I'm frustrated with my journey. I'm not making any progress. And she had learned for 8 n years from other people before that. So I said sure let's let's see what I can help you with. In the first 10 minutes, it became painfully clear that she had major problems in note recognition itself. Now, you wouldn't expect this from somebody who has learned classical music for 9 years. So, this was like a huge shock to me. My first attempt at debugging this was to get her a toness test. So, I asked her to go to a doctor because if you're tonedeaf, you can't distinguish between two

8:40frequencies. Very, very rare thing. Most people are not tonedeaf. But if that is the case, then there is no possibility that I can teach music or she can learn. And so the the issue was like she couldn't hit the right notes or even recognize she was hitting. There are 12 points on the octave, right? Mhm. So she couldn't recognize half of them. So she would basically miss out on she

9:06would just know the the big ones and then all the minor notes she would sort of miss out on. not just not recognize. So it turned out that she was not tonedeaf. So this was even more of a conundrum because now how do you debug this? And so then digging deeper I realized that basically she had gotten into some bad habits. So her neural pathways were a little bit messed up. And what that meant was that when she was learning and practicing she didn't get enough

9:34guidance to course correct as she was making the mistakes. So those mistakes became the habit. So now I was trying to figure out how to fix this. And the obvious answer is to give her guidance whenever she practiced. But I couldn't do that because I mean I had a family, she was in the US. If there's a time zone difference, I couldn't teach her for more than an hour a week and then certainly not give her guidance whenever she practiced. So I thought, hey, it's 2017. There must be an app that does this by now. So I just looked at the app store hoping that you know somebody had already solved the problem. But sadly there was no single app that did this

10:13for human vocals. There were many guitar tuners. Yeah. Yeah. That's like a pretty common category, right? Exactly. Guitar tuners were thousands of guitar tuners on the app store but not a single app that did human vocal tuning and guidance. What's different about that? The notes are the same, right? That's what I thought till I went deep into digital signal processing and there were a lot of interesting tuning algorithms that had come out in the last 3 four years before I started and there was one in particular which promised to be very very accurate very fast. So I basically without really understanding how it did its stuff I implemented it in swift. Had you written swift

10:57before? All of these things I was learning for the first time just to solve a problem for her. But I thought I'm a software engineer so I should be able to pick this up and and do some damage with it. So I started looking into touring algorithms. And this one in particular, it worked very well. I didn't understand what it was doing because I was just looking at its sort of pseudo code

11:19and just put it in practice. It took my iPhone 7 Plus battery from about 2 days to 20 minutes. I could have probably made an omelette on my phone. It was that hot. Goodness. So now I was like, "Oh, I can't I can't use this directly. I have to understand how this is working and all of that." So now it was a full deep dive. And digital signal processing is something that I learned at a very shallow level in my sort of bachelor's days, right? And I realized how shallow it was really and how deep it actually goes. And the rabbit hole goes really really deep and it was all news. I I

11:58love learning new things. So it was fun for me and because I was not on a deadline, I was not on a deliverable. So I looked into a topic called psycho acoustics which was even more fascinating because this is the psychology of how humans perceive sound. And so there are things like just noticeable difference. how the ear actually maps different frequencies to different regions of the inner ear and how that works and how resolutions and accuracies change across ages across different people different frequency ranges. So it was all fascinating. Just from my understanding, it sounds like your goal at this stage was you wanted, you know, a a person to vocalize a note and for it

12:42to be able to show visually how close to hitting that note it it was, right? What note it was and how close is it to the standard. Now the problem is that with human voices right with instruments typically the fundamental frequency in the FFT is very very strong. So the amplitude of that fundamental frequency is very detectable and you can just bucket it and then pick out the largest sized bucket. Mhm. With human voices or with complex instruments like the violin for example or the sarangi or it's not the case. The fundamental frequency might be actually lower amplitude than some of the other harmonics and this is what gives the voice its unique tamber but it also

13:29makes the analysis very difficult. Apologies for very ignorantly going a little deep on this, but it's because a human voice is actually producing multiple frequencies at the same time. And any instrument will do that, but how I've never thought about this before, but that makes sense. And that is what gives each instrument its unique recognizable tambber as it is called, right? What differentiates a guitar sound from a from a sitar sound from a trumpet sound? They're all sounds,

14:04but the the mix, the flavors so to speak of the harmonics is what gives it its unique character. So more complex instruments which the human voice is in that category. Yes. It's more difficult to to pick out what the correct frequency is that the person is like hitting. What did you call it? Fundamental frequency. Fundamental frequency. That is your the pitch that it's supposed to be at. Yeah. Or that's what's perceived as the the main frequency, I guess. And that perception is where psycho acoustics come in. Frequency is objective, but pitch is perception. Man, you're giving me a lot of Wikipedia articles to uh to go in a rabbit hole in after this, but okay. So, we'll

14:50keep moving forward. So, you got way deep into this rabbit hole, obviously. But then what what came out of the other end of that? So it took me nine attempts to finally get an algorithm that was correct, that was accurate, that was fast and that was battery efficient. And then came sort of side pieces of the of the puzzle which were things like so if you have a very noisy environment, how do you still pick out the note correctly? So instead of going the noise suppression way because noise suppression tends to remove a lot of frequencies that are actually useful in the analysis. So I I looked at it as music detection. This was a different way of solving the problem and it worked

15:34really really well. I was quite surprised actually and so with these two three pieces and the psycho acoustics also comes in in the how I objectively define the level of the tuner. So how difficult it is, how easy it is. So plus minus what number of cents defines the easy level defines the advanced level defines the expert level was a perceptual problem. So with that piece I put on a very simple user interface which was basically just a circle that showed a left and right arc. So if the note is flat or low it would go left and become blue. If it is sharp or high, it would go right

16:17and it would become orange. And if you hit it correctly, it would become the whole thing would glow green. And then if you held it, sustained it correctly at that frequency without deviation, it would suddenly become a fat green, which was very satisfying. So a little bit of dopamine there to reinforce that habit of that perfect note. Okay. So you built that. Now at this stage you're literally just building this for the your one student and also your own fun. I wanted to try out the thing on myself and sort of see how far I can go in the accuracy axis and so I built a super

16:56expert level just for myself which was supposedly less than the just noticeable difference of the ear. So the it was under the resolution of the human ear and it took me about 2 months of daily practice but I was able to cross into that through other means. So I was able to triangulate with the reference drone and sort of I don't know how it actually works but it worked really well. So this was for me and for for my student one student. So I sent her a beta version to see how she would respond to this how whenever she practiced if it gave her guidance. The theory was that her

17:30neural pathways should realign and sort of come back on track. I was surprised at how quickly she was able to go from a score of 5% to 80%. It took her 2 weeks. I was not expecting this. She was doing about an hour a day for 2 weeks. So this was mind-blowing to me. She was of course ecstatic that because now her music could finally progress. Well, and also to be clear, she was already before this, she was spending an hour a day practicing or something, right? In more inconsistently than

18:04that because she had sort of she had been doing other things. She was frustrated. Maybe it was more motivating to be consistent, but part of it is also the fact that it's No, it wasn't just consistent practice because before I gave her the app, she was learning for about 2 months and I was trying to get her to practice every day and she did and that didn't help because the missing piece was the guidance. Yeah, it's the it's like having a person in the room who can tell you immediately if you're on or not. And this is where there was an ancient system of learning in

18:35India called the gurukul. Guru is the teacher. Kool is the home. So the student would go live with the guru traditionally and learn the craft for years and would be instructed and guided for 8 10 hours a day or more. And this created truly the golden age of of Indian classical music in my opinion because there's no way that a student would go wrong in this kind of system. Couple of weeks, couple of months and your neural pathways are super highly precise and will never go wrong after that. But today students are learning an hour a week practicing by themselves many times a week without any guidance. And the danger is that if you if you practice something multiple

19:17times without knowing whether you have gotten it right or not, that is where things start to become kind of dangerous. So that is a problem I wanted to solve. And then with one student who was showing remarkable progress from a very disadvantaged sort of uh score to begin with, I thought maybe it'll help five other people. So I decided to name it Nad Sadhana. Nad is the the

19:43essence of music of sound itself and sadhana is systematic dedicated practice devoted practice. So I thought it's a fitting name for for what the app is trying to do and I released it on the app store. So this was how my first first release happened. Did you do anything to promote it? Did you have more beta testers than just your your student at that point or was it literally like let's take this thing that I made and just kind of put it on the app store, give it an icon, gave it a name and see what happens. That's basically what I did. I just put it up on the app store and

20:18I gave it as beta tests to my students. But that was it. I never realized that an app needs to be promoted and there's marketing involved and all of that. But again, it was such a simple app that I thought maybe I will wait a little bit and add some more sort of meteor features before I think about promoting the app because to me it was just a single tool right now. It wasn't really an app. And so that was the second part of the the second set of features that I decided to add and this was well before that how how did that launch itself go? Like was it what you were

20:53thinking it not really many people downloaded it because people didn't really discover it? It was just word of mouth. Some people said to other people that, "Hey, I've been using this app. My notes are improving." I told it to a few people that I know and that was it. I probably broke even sort of my developer fees. I was able to recover that maybe 2 3x of that. So that was it. I never intended to make money with it when I launched it because I wanted her to get good at notes because if my students are very good at their notes, then it saves me a lot of time rather than correcting

21:29notes, I can focus on teaching them more advanced, more fun topics. So that was a win for me. You said you made some money. So it had some sort of payment in there initially. What was the business model? It was an upfront payment. Okay. of I I don't remember what it was. It was not small. It was not like a dollar. Yeah. I think it was like $10 or something. Okay. I don't know why I priced it. I just I just didn't Yeah. It sounds like at this stage it wasn't like this is my new business and livelihood. It was like the cool thing about the app store is you can take something you made

22:04even for a small personal reason and you could publish it to the entire world and kind of see what happened. Exactly. From there you then started building on top of it. what was the motivation behind adding more? So for that we have to go back a few years and there have been apps and there have been sort of these machines for accompanying specifically for classical music but now you can extend that to all genres but there have been drones and there have been sort of drum or tabla kind of machines which basically play a unchanging loop like a metronome. It's music but it doesn't change. So, it's great for initial practice, but as soon as you start to perform

22:46a little bit more spontaneously, that becomes a a barrier. Yeah. Because that's something that's unique about about this style of music, it sounds like, is I mean, there's other styles of music like this, but like it is sort of this organic different every single time experience. So, you wouldn't necessarily want just a pre-recorded song to to perform to. No, it's like jazz, right? If you have a drummer playing exactly the same thing every time in jazz, it'll still be the

23:14same problem, right? So, I thought now that my app has ears, what if I give it a brain? And these were all sort of shots in the dark. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had never done artificial intelligence before. I had dabbled in sort of the theory of genetic algorithms and evolutionary program design and given some talks on it at a sort of student level because it fascinated me. and I taken a AI course at my master's uh co level and remind me what what yearish are we talking about because obviously AI is something very specific now uh that is not the

23:51case you know not that long ago from now no this was probably a few months after so mid 2018 okay so this is even pre- pandemic so yeah yeah yeah yeah and this is before LLMs and all of that Yeah. So AI wasn't really a commodity at that point in time and it was it was less accessible but all of the problems that I wanted to solve had never been done before. And so things like creativity in a melodic sense, creativity in a rhythmic sense, appropriateness, aesthetics, what is beautiful, what is not, all of this was never really done. And so I started sort of inventing solutions,

24:34homegrown solutions sitting in my little home office here. And solutions meaning like your your goal at this point was you specifically wanted something that would synthesize music that was organic and and everchanging and everything, but like it was playing the music itself from the app. Yes, it was creating and playing music in real time spontaneously. And so I started with an instrument which is called a swarm bundle which is basically an auto harp but without the keys on top. So it's just a harp 40 strings and you tune it to a particular scale or rag and it takes a long time to accurately tune 40 strings but the effect is magical. It sounds fantastic. These are

25:22plucked. That is more auto harp. You specifically play it. Here you will basically strum it in patterns but you can also play it. You need long fingernails for it. So there were logistics like traveling with this instrument became a pain especially in the later years because airlines started becoming very interesting and then audiences also don't really have the patience for me to sit and tune the instrument for 20 30 minutes every time I change my my scale or rag. So

25:54I thought this is a perfect use case for something that is a portable instrument. It is in my phone. I can pull it out at any point in time and sort of play it and it'll play intelligently, creatively, artistically, spontaneously and recreate the magic that I experience when I play the swarm myself ideally. And this was a hugely ambitious goal because I never thought it would even be remotely possible but I wanted to give it a proper shot and this is when I started delving into AI realizing that existing techniques don't work for me so I started inventing techniques. I have a fascination with neuroscience and learning theory and biohacks and all of these kind of topics. I also have

26:43fascination with other topics like mathematical topics. So graph theory, discrete mathematics, optimization theory and so somewhere I was able to combine some of these ideas and something came out of it which was surprisingly humanlike at that point. And so I thought that yes this is actually promising. I can actually go deeper in this. And so I implemented the surandal. There were problems with the the sound itself because the suramandal because of the way that the sound resonates in the body of that that mahogany body. I was not able to just simply sample it. There's two things we're talking about here. One is all the AI neural network stuff about the creativity of what

27:30to play. But the other side which to me sounds just as ambitious unless there's like frameworks or something that I I which maybe is what you're using is is synthesizing the sound itself. Yes. I was only able to get so far with sampling it. Were you recording your own samples or were these like stock elements or something that you had found? No. So I have a swarm bundle here. So I recorded individual strings the whole thing yourself. My goodness. Okay. I mean it was easy for me to do

28:01and play around with it and see if it works. I was hoping that it would work but it lacked something. It lacked the characteristic of that rich resonant sound. So I realized that just sampling is not sufficient. I have to sort of simulate I have to model the interactions of these strings with the body of the thing and the room and and suddenly it became a much more full-blown problem to solve and so I jumped into that. I had tried to solve this problem in 2012 on Android because I was

28:33at Google. I had an Android phone. I learned Java for the sake of it. I didn't enjoy that. But I realized very quickly that the the audio is stuttering so badly because when you're playing a Swarmandal, these strings are playing you're going to strum the whole thing 40 strings or 30 strings in half a second or quarter of a second. So they are these are 10 20 30 milliseconds apart these strings and it was stuttering so badly that it sounded terrible. It sounded horrendous. I went two buildings across to the Android building and I had a few friends there and I said this is the code I have. This is the output. This is what I expect it to sound like. Is it my bug? because I

29:18did a lot of sort of binary debugging to figure out where the issue is and I couldn't detect it in the code itself. So it had to be like a kernel level or a OS level thing and they said yeah Android is not designed for real-time audio at all. And I measured it and there is an there is a audio latency from the point that I say play a sample to the point it actually hits the sound

29:40card and plays the sample. There is a 20 to 200 millisecond latency which is not predictable. This was a dealbreaker because I wanted something that is submillisecond because if the if the strings are playing of the samples are playing at few millisecond resolution having an error of 20 milliseconds which is the best device was not possible. Android doesn't have a realtime audio like API. No. How do games do that? Cuz games have to because they they loop they buffer everything and it's it's not autogenerated. It's not spontaneous. So what they do is they have short loops and as the scene changes or as the evil whatever character comes in the

30:24music changes those it's okay to have a one time penalty of 200 milliseconds or they have all of this playing at the same time already buffered and they just mute tracks. I couldn't do any of that because all of my music that the app generates was all based on the analysis that had happened. And so the analysis had to be very fast on so many different parameters. And then it had to play all of these samples correctly and at the right time because if it was delayed either it would stutter or it would be too late. So I got my first iPhone and Mac MacBook when my wife

31:01quit Apple and we moved back to India. I got a nice discount on that. Actually, you know, the tuner was a different I didn't associate it to low latency, but it was that. But then I realized that I didn't have high expectations initially because I thought if Android has this fatal flaw, why would Apple be any better? But I was so wrong and it was so stunning. Even with simple code, like just playing the samples, it sounded so fantastic, so smooth, so lifelike. And then when I modeled it, there was more computation. There was more intense stuff happening. It still sounded fantastic. The latency was sub millisecond. And now I kept adding instruments. I kept pushing the

31:42boundaries. And it's it still sounds phenomenal. And there is no other platform that can support the the things that I'm doing. And that is the reason that the app is iOS exclusive. Only iPhones and iPads. Okay. So at this stage you had an app in the store that was making some money but you were still thinking of it sort of as a side. It was barely anything. So I I never considered it as a source of income at all. So then what you were doing at this stage building all of this uh this AI performer basically were you just thinking of it in terms of like for you doing

32:19performances like oh this will be really handy or were you thinking like oh this will be fun to add into that app? No. So I think that goes down to the philosophy of my problem solving and I typically tend to solve problems for me or people that are close to me like my student and then if it works well then I think maybe this is useful to other people as well. But because I am the first customer of my solution that I think for me at least it makes it better because then you have a very high bar. You have a very high expectation of the solution and there are no compromises. So

32:54it has to behave a certain way. It has to do a certain task in a certain way and nothing less than that will be acceptable. And so I had a swarmandal now my first instrument AI instrument. Then I added the drones, the tanpuras which also had the same problem because most of these drones

33:13either were synthesized or had samples but never really took the modeling equation into account. And that was also a fun exercise which involved sort of deriving partial differential equations of how the string is hitting the curved bridge of the tanpura which is what makes it special. That buzzing sound the tanpura characteristic sound is because it's a curved. What does that mean? Like I guess I'm not fully following what you even mean. So part of this is sort of secret sauce in some sense because that's fair. I will I will extract the essence of the samples and then take that as my sort of genetic material to then model the interactions of these sounds and some of

33:55them are partial differential equations. Some of them are more interesting modeling based on sort of natural phenomenon. Sometimes it is sort of the model of the gas states bouncing around. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it is elasticity that works. Sometimes it is other spring properties that work. I don't know. It just I just try these things out. Some of them stick, some of them don't. It's not any conventional way of looking at it. It's all homegrown new ideas. This is all Swift running on the CPU or are you doing stuff on the GPU at this point? So I do use Accelerate for the really high performance parts. I will use accelerate to run things on the GPU. There is some metal tricks that

34:35I play once in a while and there is the neural engine that I will also use and then the CPU. So, it's a mix of things. It's really impressive the hardware capabilities that Apple has created that allows me to throw workloads at it and it it doesn't even break into a sweat really. It is really impressive. Okay. So you you started adding instruments uh multiple instruments at this point. Did you release them like instrument by instrument and you're just kind of funneling this into the app or was this big sort of side project you were working on that eventually you added into the app as a big new release? No, no, because the tuner was part of the app and

35:15then the tuner was integral to all of these other features. So then the first feature was a tuner. The second feature was the swarm bundle. Third third version added tanpuras and 100 Indian ragas and some western scales and so it it progressed from there and I now realized that there is a very ambitious project that I want to do which is to emulate the tabla and a tabla is a very complex instrument very capable instrument. It has a very wide variety of sounds that it can produce and there are a lot of rules of accompaniment both sort of written and unwritten of aesthetics of appropriateness and it's a very it's a entire sort of PhD topic in itself. It's

35:58made of two drum pieces and it's a vertical standing drum and you play it with your hands and the range of sounds that it can create is just absolutely breathtaking. So I I didn't know if it'll ever work or not, but I wanted to give it a shot because when I am on stage performing live with my tabla player friends and with my harmonium friends and all of the instruments that I will perform with, that is truly magical. That is that spontaneous creation, that shared

36:30musical dialogue is so amazing, so much fun and it elevates everyone's music to the next level. It is the best example of collaboration really that happens in front of your eyes and yours. That magical element is sorely missing when I practice by myself at home. Yeah. Because with all of these loop-based accompaniment, it doesn't actually change and it doesn't create that spontaneous give and take. Every time you add an instrument, then are the sort of AI players are they like listening to each other and doing what you just described like collaborating and then are they're listening to your vocals and all that's kind of going into this algorithmic soup to kind

37:18of cause that pseudo collaboration? That is a very perceptive question because that's exactly what it does. They are listening to each other. They're loosely coupled. So they are listening to each other. They're listening to the singer or the instrumentalist, the main artist who the user of the app and they are creating music that sort of spontaneously creates order. It emerges. It's an emergent property. Like this isn't a single composition where the the system is spitting out no like music for each of these players. It's you have three separate entities doing their

38:00own thing and taking each other as inputs. Exactly. And they have guiding principles. So you set the the scale or the rag, you set the tempo, you set the rhythmic cycle, whether it's a particular tal or groove, whatever it is, right? Those parameters are defined and those are given to the app. But between that they'll basically figure out what to play, how to improvise, how to interact, when to play what, when not to play what. All sort of loosely coupled and spontaneously because I thought that maintaining that artistic spontaneity would be the crux of

38:36recreating that artistic spontaneous experience that I have with my musician buddies at home. And I think I was right at the end of it because I've never tried anything else but this worked so well that I didn't have to try anything else. And so the tabla became my sort of my most challenging task to date. And it took me several years because I never learned tabla. To play tabla is a whole other ball game. As a singer I understand tabla well enough that I can sing with it but to play it is a completely different thing. I understood enough to implement it. I I still cannot play. I

39:15will never be able to play the tabla well. But I understand the nuances much better now and the app understands them much better now. And it started to sort of grow. And here is the thing, right? All of the new AI models, the generative AI, the LLMs, these are based on a very large amount of data. That data piece is so critical. And these are huge models, gigabytes, terabytes of data is fed into it. I didn't have those resources to begin with. I didn't want to go that route because it becomes

39:48challenging sort of legally as well, ethically as well. So I didn't want to enter that area at all. So I wanted to approach it in a way where I when I teach my students how they learn, how the brain actually learns. So I created something which I call the mimisis engine which is a new way of looking at how these learnings are incorporated. If you think of neural networks and the different weights that are associated with these uh neural pathways the mimis engine does things in a different way. This is all sort of secret sauce. It's just a name that I want to sort of throw out

40:22there because it is a completely new way of doing things. And then instead of neural networks, I use something called that I call BOF feedback neural networks. So they work in a different way and I was able to build it on top of the neural engine with Apple's hardware. And so this is why I call it artistic intelligence. Artistic intelligence. I like it. And so that was the tabla. And then I added in uh more harmony instruments of the piano. There was violins, string section, trumpet section. Then I added some percussion which was not as hard of a problem certainly. But then with 10 instruments I had to add a orchestrator layer so conductor level AI to make sure that

41:05all of these pieces all of these musicians are interacting seamlessly and collaborating well without stepping on anybody else's toes or anybody else's music. What was happening before you had that? Were you were you starting to notice like they were playing over each other or they couldn't because it was loosely coupled before and it is still loosely coupled but now it has a little bit of a guidance. Suddenly the music would swell in suddenly it would sort of diminish because everybody would start playing at once and then everybody would sort of drop off. Not everybody but like the string section would come in with the trumpet section and sort of create a peak and then

41:42it would suddenly go down. So that didn't sound great. So now they sort of collaborate within each group as well as with the outer with the rhythm and with the singer and with the with the other things. So there are ways of composing in layers with these instruments. Okay. So you just described like you've added a whole bunch of of new instruments. You added this conductor layer. at this point in the story, is it still just an app that's in the store that's not really making

42:13any real money or has it started kind of gaining traction and getting attention by this point? So by this point actually with the 10 instruments this was around the time that the pandemic hit and during the pandemic I was feeling very helpless and sort of depressed and because I wanted to help but what can I do right I'm a software engineer I'm a singer how can I possibly help in this dark time and so then I thought maybe I can create a song which sort of encodes tips of how to survive the pandemic and then also put in some optimism that yes we will survive the pandemic although

42:53we didn't know it at that point in time but it was such a depressing time for everybody that I knew that I thought some optimism would be much needed and so I did this song I composed it and I recorded it with the app and this was a kind of a messy setup because it took me about two two and a half hours to record a 2-minute song with the setup with the app sort of putting out one single audio track and then I had to record my voice separately and then video separately and then mix it in. This was before you had cuz you kind of have a YouTube channel now that

43:26you you do videos. I've had a YouTube channel for a while. Okay. And I put it up there but I also sent it out to a few friends on WhatsApp. like the video I sent it on WhatsApp the first time that I had done this and to my utter astonishment it went viral in a way that I mean you hear stories about this but it is never you never think that it'll happen to you and it went viral my phone started blowing up 10 minutes later and I got I got a call from my guru G you have to realize that Pandit Jasra gi was he's no more but he was an icon

44:04He was the one of the most famous musicians of the world at that point in time. A career that spanned nearly you know 70 80 years. He was he was nearly 90 years at that point in time and incredible musician composer phenomenal person. I had not had the courage to send him my composition because it was a classical Hindustani classical song in Rag Basant but the main topic was a virus and it had some geeky puns and some humor and I was not sure so I only sent it to a few close friends to see what their reaction would be and then I decided to put it up on YouTube before I

44:44had actually put it up on YouTube he called me and he said at least 300 people have sent me your song and I'm wondering who are these 300 courageous people who can send a video forward on WhatsApp to Pandit Jasraji and then he said Basant may bahar which means that you made basant basant is spring blossom and it was a play on words on the rag name as well and then he asked me the question tabla has been played very well who has played the tabla with you who my app had passed the musical

45:22touring test. This was a huge milestone for me. So he was asking you who played that instrument. He didn't know about this work because it was sort of recent work of course. Yeah. And he didn't know about the capabilities of the app and what I was doing by that time. And then I told him and he was so happy that he said this is very necessary work. You're doing the right thing. You're you're going to keep music alive and keep it evolving. And he gave me a lot of blessings. But that moment was so much and from a judge like if you imagine them Turing tested there's a judge there a human

45:54judge and there's a computer you cannot expect a better judge than Pijas Rajit like have you not have you run into any of the sort of fear negativity about like you're going to replace uh real musicians absolutely so I wanted to answer that question about the revenue and the app going well so after this point people started realizing that this was actually accompaniment by an app and then they started looking into it and I saw a sort of uptick in the revenue as well as the and the downloads. But yes, there were a lot of people who initially thought that I was doing something wrong by infusing music with artificial intelligence that I would replace accompanists and

46:36artists and this was a few years ago now that fear has been completely superseded by what other AIs are doing which is completely replacing the entire process itself. and you just give it a prompt and it gives you the song completely in a given style voice with all the orchestra. But that I don't think that is fully music because it is still bits and pieces from other artists that

47:01have been merged together in perhaps new ways. But what my app was doing was enhancing humans. When these people saw what this AI is now doing, the new AI, they realized the value of my app, and they realized that I'm giving them a flight simulator. I'm not giving them a self-driving car. I don't want to replace the drivers. Because see, when you are on stage, that experience comes once in a while. For for the vast majority of musicians, only the most professional, the most frequent performers will get onstage experiences every day. But the vast majority will have to practice at home hoping that they will have accompanists once in a while to to sort of bounce

47:42their musical ideas off and collaborate with and then they will be comfortable on stage. So it's like a flight simulator because if you don't have access to a a plane then you want to practice in an environment that is as close as realistic as possible so that when you do get access to a plane you not only survive it but you also enjoy the ride. And so that was my intention. That was my thought process. And now people are seeing it. And in fact there is a lot of ethical boundaries that I've put in the app for that very reason. Because for example if there is a tabla phrase

48:16or a drum phrase or a guitar phrase, the app can certainly play faster or more complex than a human can ever achieve. But I have put limitations based on what a human can do so that the app still feels realistic and human, right? like I have to compute how fast how far the hand will move on a surface like the tabla with the friction involved and then how fast can certain combinations of samples or bowls can be played or on a guitar if you're strumming how fast that the wrist can actually move. I've mapped out great performers and sort of put these boundaries and put these

48:54limitations into the app so that it feels natural. It feels realistic. Yeah. Oh, that's crazy. So at this stage then it's it's still paid upfront but it's starting to get some attention and and some traction. No by this time I actually changed my model. So the tuner was pay up front but the swarm bundle onwards the second version onwards Apple had just introduced subscriptions. So I made the app free and you can try the features out as many times as you want. Some instruments, some features will be time limited so that you get an idea of what the feature is and if you think that it is useful then you can subscribe. It's a small subscription. It's like a medium

49:38coffee latte per month. It's a lot of like professional or at least hobbyists like people taking this very seriously as a as a practice, right? Oh, absolutely. And in fact, I looked at some of the analytics. The average number of hours per person per day that the people are using the app is like four hours 50 minutes. Oh man. In over eight sessions. So these these are serious musicians. Yeah. Don't let the don't let the VCs uh on the call hear this. Uh I have had offers to

50:14buy out the app and the only question I ask them every time is what feature would you add next? They had no answer. And it it now truly seems that I'm the only person who is passionate enough to evolve this app in the way that I care about in the sense that an artist, a performing artist cares about because there are things that people don't know that I've done that will not matter to the vast majority of people, but it will matter to me. like the tanpuras getting all of the partial differential equations all of that is I mean it's not truly necessary for a from a business

50:52point of view but from an artistic point of view that really makes the world of a difference to me but there has been some recognition that you've gotten because I think maybe can see in the in the background of your of your frame over there there's a little there's a little uh uh aluminum or aluminium cube over there. uh what's what's the story behind that? So I think the the dream started in 2019 because that was the time that I got to actually go to the DubWDC Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in person and after that there was a pandemic. So that was the that was the first year that I was there and then it sort of became online after that for a few years and

51:37I attended the the Apple design awards ceremony there as an audience member. I was looking at all of these beautifully designed apps being showcased on the screen and they got this superb cube and there was like a split second where I thought one day perhaps and then I quickly threw that out because I realized that I'm a niche developer. I'm I'm a hobby developer working in a very niche area of Indian music and classical music at that at that point. This was before all the guitars and drums and everything else came in. And I realized that I don't really have design expertise. I'm a

52:14I'm a fan. I'm a enthusiast of design, but I'm not professionally trained. I'm not a career. I don't have a professional career in design. I don't have a marketing team. I don't have a design team. These are all superbly designed, expertly designed apps that are winning. So, I sort of assumed that this is not for me and I sort of forgot about it. Not forgot. It was probably still there at the back of my mind, but I I thought it was not realistic. But it it really felt like I was at the Oscars. That experience was so inspiring and overwhelming just as an audience member. So there was probably that at the back of my mind. And I continued adding features and

52:52in 2021 Nad Sadana won for innovation the Apple design award which was amazing for many reasons because I'm only the second Indian to ever win this award. And so from that point of view it was a big deal for me. But the more important thing was that this was the very first time that Apple was giving this award for an app that was about Indian music and culture. Yeah. And so as an Indian musician developer, it really meant the world to me that Apple was able to recognize this effort. Whenever I was I was in Bangalore, that's where we met was at uh Swift Barat. I really got

53:32the sense from the developer community and the Apple developer community at least that there was a real sense of pride in kind of the the emerging Indian like developer scene since I've been doing it. I there's been a long list of Indian indies. That's kind of funny to say together. They've been making really cool apps and at least on Twitter I've known a whole bunch. But there was a real sense whenever I was there that there's this kind of like ground swell. Uh and it seems like it just kind of started with you and I guess Raj uh was Raja was the first Indian to win the or yeah 2018

54:09I think when I think about my list of uh you know who has a chance for an ADA in the future. There's there's a couple Indian uh uh developer designers that are like definitely clearly on that list. See now Indian colleges there are some like four or five universities now that have iOS developer centers in the campus itself. So they have a 100 Macs, iMacs and iPhones and trained staff, mentors and they are developing apps and couple of decades before I started in my journey and they have so many more resources now and so I I'm sure that there are going to be some incredible apps some amazing innovations that come out of that ecosystem not just India all over the world

54:53because students are now seeing this the swift uh student challenge and all of these programs right there's so much awareness at a young age. So, it's really exciting to see what I can learn from what they are doing and what inspiration I can take from them. Yeah, that's that's super cool. But yeah, I mean getting an ADA is a crazy achievement. I guess that was 2021. So, that would have been during the virtual time. So, you didn't get to go like on on stage and kind of No, I got a call at like 2:00 a.m. and say, "Are you awake? are you watching the ceremony? I'm like,

55:31yes, stay awake. Stay watching the ceremony. And then lo and behold, the names were announced and I was there and it was it was surreal. I I sometimes still can't believe it. It's it sunk in a little bit now, but it's been a few years, but it was completely surreal. That's so cool. So, I guess coming off of that, did did that make a dent in the business? Did it feel like things started picking up even more after that? Yes, actually there was a large upswing in so some of them were casual downloads who see just out of curiosity what an Apple design award-winning app looks like and perhaps so some of them didn't Yeah. Your conversion rate probably dropped quite

56:14a bit. Uh yeah. Yeah. So there was a rise and then a small say 20% maybe 15% dip. But what happened was a lot of younger generation who were tuned into the Apple Design Awards and knew about it, they downloaded it. Some of them were musicians or students of music and they told their teachers that there is this new app that has come out and we should try it out. And there were a lot of artists truly phenomenal artists who looked at this app who played with it who understood the value that it brought to the musician community as a whole and they recommended it to their students

56:54and so that is how it sort of started to then permeate sort of the musician musical ecosystems. So, at this point though, were you full-time on this as as your main job or were you still doing other things before that or at that point? Oh, I was doing several full-time jobs. So, I have my two twins at that point and this this was a full-time job because because the app started 2 days after they were born. So I was sort of developing either when they were sleeping or I was practicing sort of the Swaramandal stuff and music and to put them to sleep. Yeah. And so wherever I got few minutes, 5 minutes, I would add a line of code,

57:36I would add a small feature, I would add a test. And it has been like that. It's been getting better as they're growing older. So now they're almost eight. I also am a performing artist. So I travel and perform at different parts of the world. I've been giving talks on my journey on I've become a motivational speaker somehow. So that has been also occupying my time. It's been increasing in frequency and then the endless evolution journey was also continuing. there were a couple of corporate gigs that I would do once in a while and so it was it was a mix of all of these things but I wanted to spend the large part of the day with my kids the the primary

58:18reason I left my job and my wife left her job and people actually were not happy with our decision then a lot of people said oh you're being really foolish to leave a lucrative job at Google and Apple in the US and then moving back to India but we wanted to be here for our kids as much as we And so that there are no regrets. Absolutely. It's been a wonderful thing. But wherever I get the time, I will code. I will do there's also content creation. So I'm recording. I'm creating original compositions and content for YouTube and other channels. So there's all of that and I'm also

58:55teaching. At this point though, like this app and sort of the stuff around it is your main job then outside of family obviously. Yeah, effectively because all of it feeds into that. My teaching, my music, my creation, all of that sort of feed into the app now. So it becomes sort of this one-stop shop kind of app for all of my proclivities. That's fun. So as this became your like kind of main source of income then were you doing things to grow the business? Were you thinking of it in terms of a business or were you pretty much focusing on the product and then that people were coming and so you could just kind of keep focusing on the product and that that drove

59:44the growth of the business. I think I was I was focused more on the feature set and capability of the app because in my mind and this is perhaps a mistake or a naive way of looking at it but I thought that the more capable I make the app the more attractive it'll be to people to use and to use on a daily basis and then they might subscribe to the app. That has been happening. The app has been growing steadily and I've not done any targeted marketing. There might be a time that I do targeted marketing but I keep thinking that you know there is this feature to add there is that

1:00:24feature to add. I don't want to make the mistake of marketing too early but now I think there is sufficient amount of features in the app that perhaps I I I started thinking about it a little bit. So maybe in the future I can do that. But yeah, so far it's all been organic word of mouth. That's what I was going to say. Where is it coming from? It's not like a category. It's not like ASO, you know, search traffic. It makes sense here because people, you've invented a category. So, if you're not doing the marketing yourself to like educate people to come here, then they have to

1:00:59be coming from I guess yeah, word of mouth or or users, which I guess maybe this is word of mouth, but users sharing it themselves in sort of public channels. Yes, exactly. Because you have to understand how good it is for your music to be able to tell other people that it will help them with any credibility. And the other thing is that if I create videos, the accompaniment is now so lifelike, the music that it creates is so lifelike and so good that you might not even believe that it is actually really done by an app. You could think that it was post-processing or somebody played a track for you or whatever. That's the thing, right? As a demo,

1:01:43it it sounds like you're just playing uh pre-recorded music. That's the problem. It's so good now that it feels like it's not really true, but only when I do a live demonstrations, people really understand that, oh, this is all real time. This is all spontaneous. This is all happening on the device locally. And then they really get so excited. So the live demo that I did when we uh did the live version of the show but audience was so excited about it. They were so in the in the moment in the music. So at at the live show we did we ended it with uh you demoing the

1:02:19app live on stage. It was very exciting. Right. It was an Indian conference but there was a decent you know international crowd. This is actually my question where it kind of had like Harry Potter thematic elements to it but it was obviously it was the Harry Potter theme of Hedwig composed by the great John Williams but I had added my own sort of Indian fusion twist to it. So when I was singing it was the Harry Potter theme but what I tell the app is what is the rhythm, what is the tempo and what is the scale. And so there's a rag called kirwani which fits very nicely within that

1:02:57part of the theme. So I told it that and based on that it was able to listen to me and then build everything else spontaneously. So if I do it again it'll sound different. It'll sound like the Harry Potter. It'll sound appropriate but the elements will be different each time. Okay. So it was your singing that brought in what did you call it? The rag. So it's like a scale. It's a set of nodes but

1:03:22it is much more than a scale. It is there are a lot of rules in involved. There are some nuances. There are some some traffic rules. It makes it a a state machine of nodes that has proportions that has probabilities that has some some predetermined parts some spontaneous paths. It's a complex state machine. On the other hand, a scale is usually very straightforward. It's a fully connected graph and it's a stick machine where any state can follow any other state legally. In Iraq, that might not be the case always. So you were just selecting a rag that Hedwig's theme kind of fits in well with and then you were singing obviously knowing the theme and then the rest of it was just

1:04:05the band the the AI band keeping up with you. Yeah, it was synthesizing all of that music on multiple instruments on the fly. Wow. Because if I I did spontaneous elements at the end of it, right? I did some improvisations and I said sang some sirum, some sulfur. I was just in the moment and it followed me accompanied me precisely well through all of these unplanned moments and in fact I did that to highlight that this is not a karaoke track or this is not pre-recorded. This is

1:04:37actually live. We talked about this ahead of time and I think maybe maybe we could try this now. Let's see if we can do a live demo right here. Are you you still down for that? Yep. Okay. So, you're gonna pull out your phone and hopefully we will record the track through the phone and then you'll be seeing it live and we'll put them together and we'll kind of get a little demo of what we're talking about here. Sounds great. And if you're just listening, you're not watching the video, pretty much it's going to be you holding your phone and you're once you start it, it's not

1:05:10like you're sitting there hitting instruments or anything. It's just kind of going and it's listening using the microphone to listen to what you're singing and keep up. Right. Exactly. Once I start the instruments, everything that they play till I tell them to stop is all spontaneously decided by the instruments based on what it hears me do. All right, let's let's hear it.

1:05:37So, I'm just going to I started the melody harmony. I'm going to start the rhythm.

1:05:50Don't need Oh dear. Daddy noo daddy dee.

1:06:42Now here is the improise part. There are dead. Oh man, when you did that uh in that in that uh theater, it was it was crazy. Everybody was going nuts. Uh that was so cool. We we've pretty much kind of covered the story. Is there anything else in particular that you want to make sure we we hit on before I kind of start the the ending bits here? I think one of the things that that was very traumatic to some people that I knew at Apple was after they announced the Apple Design Award, I was thinking of rewriting the app completely from ground up and they basically said don't be foolish because who redesigns Apple

1:07:57design about winning app and I said I have to do this because that is the only way that I see it go to the next level because by this time there were 10 instruments But to add the next set of rhythm instruments or percussion instruments like guitars or drums or another tabla or a kahoon like a clab box the architecture didn't support it. So I decided to I threw out everything I had done

1:08:24for those five five and a half years 6 years on the UI side. No everything. Oh wow. Everything. I basically took that project and all the files and I put it in archive and I started a fresh project in Xcode from scratch. And it had taken me 6 years to get to 10 instruments. And when I restarted everything, it took me 9 months to go rebuild not only all of those features again, but now reach 27 instruments and perhaps 100 new features. So there were workouts, there was songs and playlist like presets, there was uh a keyboard, there was karaoke stuff like you can change the pitch and the speed and all of that. And then I also added the recording studio

1:09:07in. So this is a fully multi-track studio quality audio HD video recording studio and it also does automatic mixing. So really really it becomes as a creator it becomes my best friend because I told you right that recording for that na corona song the corona virus bandish the song took me two and a half nearly 2 and 1/2 hours to do a 2-minute song and I'm very lazy I'm like this this should not take so much time says the guy who's like I'm going to rebuild my entire app and spend 9 months uh no because that was the laziest way to get to the next part there was no refactor possible

1:09:45there there was no incremental change possible that would get me there. So it was lazy. I don't like to repeat effort. I am I'm willing to spend the time and study and do it well once and then it should automate. So I really wanted to automate my mixing because if you've mixed any songs, you know that as the number of tracks, the number of instruments increase,

1:10:07it becomes exponentially harder to mix well. And it's almost like black magic, like a dark art. It's an art more than a science sometimes I feel. I got good at mixing in Logic Pro and so on. But it still took me like a day to mix 27 instrument tracks. And so I thought maybe this is something that the app can do better than I can do. And so it now creates sort of builds a profile of the mix as it is recording and it applies it and it is it is a dynamic mix. So it as the instruments come and go the mix will automatically adapt and create the best possible sound in those whatever

1:10:47tracks are playing at that point in time. So it saves me a lot of time and now content creators are discovering this and creating phenomenal recordings with different combinations of these 27 instruments and it is just a joy to behold them. Behold them creating something so spectacular and it's 6 year olds to 90 year olds. It is Indian musicians, western musicians. There are karnatic classical musicians, instrumentalists, dancers, even composers. There are people who are uh who don't have vision who are the app is now fully inclusive, fully accessible with voice over for colorblind people as well for people with partial hearing loss. Accessibility is a is an area that

1:11:34you're super passionate about, right? Yes. I think the vision is music without any barriers, without any boundaries. And so just because a person doesn't have eyesight shouldn't make it a boundary, shouldn't make it a barrier to be a musician or to create content. You know, you built all these tools that make it easier to create content. partially it sounds like for yourself, but I have to imagine that's feeding into that that loop of, you know, content creators creating things with the app helps spread the word about the app. Absolutely. Which then gets more people to know about it, which then make content and it kind of self-perpetuates to a degree. But before

1:12:14I let you go, I have to ask you the question that I ask everyone to to end the show, which is uh what's a person or people out there that inspire you and your work that you'd recommend others check out? There are so many sources of inspiration, but since this is more of sort of a

1:12:32iOS, Apple kind of a flavor. There's of course the point free dudes Brandon and Stfan. Yeah. Yeah. I enjoy there. I think I'm attracted to people with very interesting philosophies about problem solving. M so right from sort of dystra all the way to these new new people who are who have a strong opinion about something about problem solving systematize that thinking right yes so their work I deeply appreciate but I think there's one person who made an impact on my way of looking at problem solving and that is Brett Victor ex-Apple employee he has done a bunch of design work he's an engineer but he has a couple of very powerful videos on YouTube. There's the inventing

1:13:21on principle. There is I think the future of computing or computation and there is a couple of others. But I think what he always talked about that really resonated with me was that creators need to have like this instant connection to their creation. So if you are building code and then you have to compile it and then you have to run it and then you have to create the test environment and then test it to know whether what you have done has worked or not. That process has a lot of buffer in the middle as opposed to an animator or a musician changing a knob on

1:13:57something and immediately knowing that yes that instrument's volume changed or the reverb amount changed or things like that. So I think Swift UI, playgrounds, previews, all of these were probably inspired from his ideology, his work. And then for me also when I create UI to see what works, there are so many parameters. There are colors and saturations and shapes and sizes and corner radiuses and whatnot. Right? From that point of view, if you have a set of tweaks, sliders that you can quickly change as opposed to changing code and you know what looks good and then the tools will basically generate the code for you and put it in. Or from an AI point of view, something

1:14:39like parametric control, gesture based controls, physical modeling of instruments, the simulation of different parameters for different AI models. If all of these were instantly actionable, the feedback is instant, then it makes the creation process so much faster, so much better. So, I've put all of this in practice in my app and it really saves a lot of time and effort. The iteration process becomes so much more rapid. So, I think his video is certainly your listeners should check out and it's it's a very powerful set of ideas. Yeah, I'll I'll definitely include these in the show notes. I don't know how I've I don't think I've come across these before, but it looks

1:15:23like they're they're older. Like I see 2012 was the inventing on principle talk. Yeah. Uh so yeah, they've been around for a while. So this definitely is going on my uh list of homework. Uh I came across these I think a couple of years into my app development process. I don't know how I came across it, but some rabbit hole. All right. Well, uh it was seriously super fun to get to to hang out one-on-one. Uh not in front of, you know, 300 of our other closest Indian friends. Uh so, thank you. Thank you very much for coming on. Thank you. Uh it was it was a wonderful

1:15:58conversation and you pulled out a lot of things that I've not really had the chance to share with a lot of people before because I didn't really think that they would be interested in sort of a deep dive in psycho acoustics for example. The question I always have with this show is, is anybody else interested? I don't know. All I know is that I get very interested. So, I will pull on those threads. Wonderful to see Charlie unplugged and I had a wonderful time. Thank you

1:16:23again for having me on your show. Awesome. Well, what where can people find uh you and your work? So, my website I think has all the links to all of the different stuff that I'm working on. It's sundepranade.com and uh that's it. Sweet. We'll have that in the show notes. Wonderful. Thank you again uh Sandep and uh I will catch you hopefully at some other point uh somewhere in the world. I look forward to that. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more launched at launchfm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm @_chucky on Twitter or charliemchapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to RevCat for making

1:17:07this episode and all future episodes of launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.