What if every song could tell you where in the world it came from?
GeoListen turns discovering music from around the world into a daily puzzle: hear a track, then guess where on the map it comes from. I am the technical lead at GeoListen, LLC — responsible for the web version, the coding, the Vietnamese (SE-Asian) localization, and the overall UI/UX of gameplay. The game grew out of the MIRAGE research at the iData Visualization Lab (Texas Tech), the open dataset of a million songs across ten thousand internet radio stations that I helped build.
How it plays
- →One puzzle a day — listen, place it on the map, and see how close you were.
- →Weekly leaderboards, layered hints, and an archive of past puzzles going back months.
- →A party mode for playing together, with Apple and Google account linking across devices.
From a research dataset to a game
MIRAGE was built to let researchers ask whether where you live shapes what you listen to. GeoListen takes that same question and hands it to everyone — a playful front door onto serious musicology, and a small stage that helps emerging artists reach listeners far from home.
Shipping on every platform
GeoListen launched its MVP in early 2026 on the App Store and Google Play alongside the browser version I lead — with a WebGL globe, Game Center leaderboards, cross-platform accounts, and a puzzle pipeline that ships a fresh round every day. A Phase 2 built for classroom educators follows later in the year.
The best way to make research matter is to make it fun enough that people forget it is research.
