What If Music Could Match Your Mood for Real?
How I built MoodScape, an iOS app that uses machine learning to find music based on how you feel, not what you've liked in the past.
A few weeks ago, I found myself scrolling through Spotify again, skipping half the songs in my "Discover Weekly". And it hit me once more how little these algorithmic playlists actually surprise me.
At least 70 percent of the tracks are ones I already know, have liked, or saved to my favorites.
And I get it. That is how collaborative filtering works. But as a melomaniac, that is not enough.
Music is not just entertainment for me. It is a way to process emotions, find resonance, and shift my energy.
So I asked myself:
What if there was a tool that helped you find music based on how you feel, not what you have liked in the past?
That one question became the seed for MoodScape, an iOS app I started building for fun because I could not stop thinking about it.
How MoodScape Works
MoodScape is simple on the outside and quietly smart underneath.
You open the app and select the emotions you are feeling. It can be anything from nostalgic, chaotic, and calm to euphoric or bitter.
Then, behind the scenes, a custom trained machine learning algorithm takes your selected emotional vector and searches for music that matches it, not based on popularity but based on emotion, tone, and audio features.
I used the Spotify API to fetch a wide base of candidate tracks, not from your history but from Spotify's global database. The model then filters and scores each song based on a weighted match between its audio features like energy, valence, mode, tempo, acousticness and the emotion profile you chose.
It is like building a mood to music embedding space, where sadness is not just a keyword but a zone in a multidimensional sound and emotion space. The result is a playlist that feels strangely accurate.
No more sad songs that just mean minor key. No more aggressive dance tracks showing up when you are feeling reflective. Just music that fits your mood, even when you cannot fully explain it.
Try It
I decided to build MoodScape as an iOS app because I wanted it to feel lightweight and personal, something you could open during a walk, a late night moment, or a random wave of feeling.
The first version is live now on TestFlight, and I would love for you to try it.
🔗 Try It Out & Join The Beta →
If you have ever felt like your music apps do not really get you, this one just might.