Keeping a listening journal helped me fall in love with classical music, so I built an app for it
Hi everyone, I made a little app that has deepened my appreciation of classical music, and I’m sharing it here in case others find it useful.
For most of my life, classical music felt inaccessible to me. Like a nut I couldn’t crack. Two years ago I fell in love with the genre. One thing that really helped me was that I started keeping a Notes file where I wrote down each new symphony I listened to, with a brief reflection on it. This habit really deepened my experience of the music, and it was fun to look back to very beginning of my classical music journey up to the present day. My reflections on Mahler 2-6 are some of my most cherished writings. Those symphonies affected me deeply (cried like a baby).
I also love programming and design, so I decided to build my ideal “Classical Music Journal” as an iPhone app and make it available for others to use. The app makes the experience much better in a few ways:
- It has all the major composers and works built in, so you don’t have to type long work names
- It syncs with your Apple Music account, so you can easily select which recording you listened to (and displays the album art in the journal)
- It’s automatically backed up to iCloud so you’ll never lose it
I’ve made the app free because I want to help other people deepen their appreciation for this beautiful art form. I plan on continually improving the app, and I’d love to build it with r/classicalmusic members in mind. Give it a try, and if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, feel free to DM me or comment here.
The app is called Opus, and you can get it free from the App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/opus-journal/id6768550946
