Real World. Real Projects.
Designed by real mentors from Dolby, Apple, Bose, Avid, Universal Audio, iZotope, Warner Bros Records, Atlantic Records, Turtle Beach, G Technology, and Roblox.
Over the course of 3 weeks, you’ll work on a real-world project, supported one-on-one by your mentor. You’ll work on a project specific to the role that interests you the most. In the first session, your mentor will work with you to understand your passions, interests, and see how to customize the project for you! Projects should be done in as little as 5 hours and no more than 20 hours. We understand how much you have going on!
Role: Product Management
Project: New Product Pitch Deck
The purpose of this project is to create a sharable document that demonstrates your ability to make a convincing business case to invest in a new product opportunity. Create a slide deck proposing a new product offering for an existing company. Set the context about the customer (who they are and the problem to be solved), describe market and competitive conditions, describe the solution, estimate effort, technologies and resources required, highlight risks and project the impact on the business.
What you’ll learn:
How to convince business leaders or investors that your ideas are worth pursuing
What is essential information you must communicate
How to present that information in the form of a narrative that is easy to follow and memorable
How to condense the proposal into a handful of sentences that you can verbally pitch to anyone on the spot
How to make a business case when you don’t have all the data/answers
Role: Marketing & Sales: Technology
Project: “Post mortem” blog post
The purpose of this exercise is to create a publishable article that demonstrates the author’s ability to understand the conditions and actions that make a product launch successful.
Pick either an existing product or service that was successful or failure, ideally a product that you have a lot of interest in and that a relatively broad audience would recognize. Research the market conditions and customer needs at the time of launch. Assess the manner in which the product was launched, review the related marketing and PR activity and content. Hypothesize the reasons for the business outcome. Formulate a recommendation to either further capitalize on success or mitigate further failure.
What you’ll learn:
How to determine if a brand was providing the right solution to the right customer at the right time.
Which launch strategies are effective
What are the limitations and risks brands face when launching a new product.
What are the market conditions that are ideal for introducing new product
What makes high quality messaging and the value of communicating that to the customer consistently
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Role: Hardware Engineering: Technology
Project: HOW DO I build it?
Create a development plan for a music, media, and consumer hardware product you are interested in.
What is it? What are your requirements?
What are your system limitations?
Create a block diagram of a design to meet your requirements and overcome your system limitations.
Determine and understand the constraints of building your hardware.
Role: Research: Technology
Project: What’s emerging?
Great news - you lead Research and Development at [ a consumer / media technology company you aspire to run R&D]. You attended the recent Audio Engineering Society event, where over 100 papers and posters were presented (papers; engineering briefs).
What’s a technology or paper that you think is most relevant for your team to further explore?
Why?
What are the potential productizable applications of that technology? How may it make your consumers lives better?
Role: A&R: Music & Entertainment
Project: Who’s Breaking?
Students should select a list of 3-5 artists a week that are undiscovered that they think can have commercial potential and a short explanation of why.Optional: Include streaming data, social data, and fanbase demographic to backup your recommendations
Deliverable: online post or PDF with embedded listening links and data
Role: Marketing for Music & Entertainment
Select an artist, and choose one (or more!) of the following challenges:
Streaming Growth
Select an artist. Create a plan to build streaming numbers on a specific platform (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, other)
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Tour Marketing
Given an existing Tour, create actionable and measurable plan to increase the likelihood of ticket sales.
Deliverable: Slides or PDF
E-Commerce
Build a strategy and product offering to realize incremental revenue for an artist.
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Artist Development
Create a marketing campaign against agreed upon goals for a largely unknown artist touching on digital, social, paid media as well as offline initiatives
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Social media planning
Create a social strategy for an artist, complete with content ideation, cadence, calendaring, engagement and growth components
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Role: Artist Management & Business: Music & Entertainment
Project: Break your artist.
Advised by top music managers, your goal is to:
Identify an artist
Articulate the vision you have for their career in 5 years and 10 years,
Identify the tools and partnerships required to achieve the vision and (4) collaborate to build a concert tour, a promotion to launch music or visuals, a brand collection, a video shoot, an emotional/wellbeing support system for the artist.
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.
Role: User Experience
Project: UX / Interaction Sound Design
The utility and communication languages within a product...the sonic “voice of an experience”.)
Consider a product with (or without) a sonic experience you’d like to redesign.
What is the medium/platform? (Mobile, desktop, hardware, VR?
Who is it for?
Why is it important?
What emotions/words express the products
What would a sonic palette sound like with the above in mind?
How many sound assets/interactions are needed for immersion?
If considering this project, how does the expected work align with your career path, passions, and interests?
project: UI Experience
The total installed base of Internet of Things (IoT) connected devices is projected to amount to 75.44 billion worldwide by 2025. One of the greatest challenges is that very few of those “devices” have rich user-interfaces to configure to the Internet.
Design an App flow to accomplish the complex activity of setting up and connecting any IOT device (your choice!). (e.g. a Ring doorbell, a simple motion sensor, a Sonos speaker, a Dyson air purifier, etc)
Mock up with a prototyping tool (e.g. Invision) and go through some end user evaluation/testing!
Deliverable: Slides , online portfolio, or PDF.
Role: Software Engineering
Project: Coding challenges - Select one of the below
Write a small app on either Android, iOS or the web that takes audio input from the microphone or from files and outputs to the speaker or to files. Then add some form of audio processing in between.
Write a small app on either Android, iOS or the web that performs autotranslation using web APIs from Google or AWS or others
Machine Learning Project: create a Matlab / Python demo of audio classification distinguishing sound effects from music and dialogue.
PROJECT: concept challenges - Select one of the below
You’ve been asked to stand up a web service on AWS that implements an identity (user login) service based on username and password. This service needs to be highly available in the USA and all of Europe. It will be hosting 100M users with peak traffic of 10k transactions per second. You must architect to be as economical as possible in terms of operating cost per month (both AWS bill and operational staffing spend). Describe your architecture, break down the cost, and justify the decisions and trade-offs you made.
Build vs. Buy with a Budget.You lead the IT team for a small recording studio. The owner wants you to set up an online booking system. Your budget is $X (TBD, say $100k). Do you build it? Do you buy it? Research options and justify your decision. Need not be a recording studio.
What’s the block diagram for cloud infrastructure for a connected audio product like a Sonos speaker. What functions are done where and why? What tradeoffs are involved?
Role: Content & Creative
Project: sonic branding and design
Consider a sonic branding initiative for a company and/or product of your choice.
What is the medium/platform? (Mobile, desktop, hardware, VR?
Who is it for?
Why is it important?
What emotions/words express the products
What would a sonic palette sound like with the above in mind?
How many sound assets/interactions are needed for immersion?
If considering this project, how does the expected work align with your career path, passions, and interests?
Optional:
How will you test that it works? What is important to evaluate?
What are the benefits to your brand?
How will you roll it out?
PROJECT: Marketing & Content Challenge.
Create (or plan) a potentially viral/remarkable content marketing campaign!
Part 1: Develop some background…
Define your audience as narrowly as possible
Understand your customer: What do they care about and where do they seek information?
Evaluate best channels for your content with as much detail as possible
Part 2: Create the Content…
What is your core message or feeling to take away from your content?
Wow factor: Deliver at least one wow/unique aspect that will help your content campaign stand out from the market.
Measurement: How will you know if your campaign is a success?
Call to action: What will you ask your customer to do?
Now go back and see if you can innovate in each of the above steps…
Role: Design
Project: A Maximum Minimum Viable Project
Find a leading brand with products (or services) that you think needs design help and design thinking.
Define a user-oriented problem that you'd like to solve. Think big, and aim for maximum impact. (You do not work there yet - so you have nothing to lose!)
Define the challenge, and a potential market for the solution. Build an MVP and preliminary design solution to support.
How would that market radically benefit from your design solution?
Deliverable: Slides , online portfolio, or PDF.
Project: Game concept design
Whether you are a designer or game enthusiast, this project allows you to build out a new game design concept and receive feedback from game designers after the mentorship program ends. Over four weeks, students will design a complete game concept from design of the objective and storyline, to the design of the world and main characters.
Establish the fundamentals, selecting where their game will be offered, determining single or multiplayer platforms, and identifying the target demographic and defining a storyline
Gather inspiration for the visual and sound elements of the game, and create a mood board
Storyboarding the world or game levels and define the key characters
Design your world and the way the characters move through the game
Deliverable: YouTube video walkthrough of the game and all key elements that define the user experience
Business, Business Development, Legal: Technology
project: DESIGN a $1,000,000+ Partnership
Create a plan for a multimillion dollar Strategic Partnership Initiative (e.g. a partnership between Sonos and Spotify? A partnership between the NFL and Apple?)
Choose a Company
Define the goals of the Company
Who is the customer? Create a user persona(s) that defines your target customer, key characteristics, and current behaviors
Create a target list of potential Strategic Partners
What is the value your Company/partnership will provide?
Develop an attractive 1-page bullet proposal.
Create a launch plan for your strategic initiative (E.g. lead lists, target events, relationship-based, etc)
Optional: Ecosystem mapping - who are the key players in the space, which will you partner with, which will you compete with, etc?
Deliverable: Slides or PDF.