Mystro is an artificial intelligence personal musical coach in the form of a Conversational User Interface that could help anyone achieve their goals. 

 Team: Annie Pyle, Gloria Ip, Hsuan-Ting, Jasmine Lopez, Nick Ricci, Timothy Wong.

 My Roles: Ideation, visual/graphic design, video-editing, prototype.




problem space
primary + secondary research
affinity diagram

Our team was inspired by the idea of music as a language ("music take[s] root in the brain as a language"–Jazz and the Brain, John Hopkins University) while identifying the problem space. We thought music could be used to express emotions that words cannot describe. After conducting primary and secondary research to better understand music as an art and music education, we organised the data into an affinity diagram. 



opportunity space
design principles

We found that many students in school fail to get the attention needed in music lessons because an average music class has at least 60-100 students per instructor. That said, we wanted to create something that would fill the gaps and has its own purpose. We created design principles to limit our concept and make sure we did not try to do too much. We also used them to guide and focus our concept development. 



woz prototype
scenario + use cases

Mystro is a personal coach that could help anybody achieve his/her musical goals. It is a platform-agnostic AI + CUI that can manifest itself through anything with ears and a voice. It can play any role the musician prefers–whether it is a close friend or a strict professional musician, and it analyzes the musician's skills and understands goals. It also works with the musician's schedule to ensure progress.


To see how Mystro would work in reality, we used Skype to teach participants to play instruments. Participants would either see a blank screen or a visual (to help show hand/finger positions, etc); on our team's side, Tim and Nick took turns being Mystro and taught the participants verbally while watching them. It was a great success–participants gave us very positive feedback, such as: "it was a lot of fun, I would do it again," or "Mystro was very nice. I can play these chords now".

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I had a great time working on this project–AI + CUI are incredibly interesting technologies to explore. Using music as a language as a basis for our entire design process was very cool and we got some very talented people involved. As usual, I learnt a lot about working as a team, and I picked up some valuable technical skills such as video-editing (i.e. color-correcting) and I conducted WOZ prototypes for the first time. The most rewarding thing was receiving compliments on Mystro from our participants!