Lyric App Framework: A Web-based Framework for Developing Interactive Lyric-driven Musical Applications

Jun Kato, Masataka Goto

Abstract: Lyric videos have become a popular medium to convey lyrical content to listeners, but they present the same content whenever they are played and cannot adapt to listeners’ preferences. Lyric apps, as we name them, are a new form of lyric-driven visual art that can render different lyrical content depending on user interaction and address the limitations of static media. To open up this novel design space for programmers and musicians, we present Lyric App Framework, a web-based framework for building interactive graphical applications that play musical pieces and show lyrics synchronized with playback. We designed the framework to provide a streamlined development experience for building production-ready lyric apps with creative coding libraries of choice. We held programming contests twice and collected 52 examples of lyric apps, enabling us to reveal eight representative categories, confirm the framework’s effectiveness, and report lessons learned.