Riffd
The Problem
Music apps let you listen. Theory apps teach you concepts on a whiteboard. Neither one takes a song you already know and tells you how it actually works. That was the gap.
What I Did
I designed a pipeline that separates any song into its individual parts, identifies the key and chords, and generates a plain-English explanation of the theory behind it. The main coordination challenge was that the three AI models doing the analysis all finish at different times. I designed the system to stream results as each layer completes — instruments first, then chord analysis, then the theory breakdown — rather than making users wait for everything at once.
I also brought in five external services to pull song metadata, lyrics, and context into the output. Playback runs entirely in the browser so the server is out of the loop once analysis is done.
Scoped, designed, and deployed entirely solo. Live at riffdlabs.com.
