Ten Years of Typing Melodies
For the ten year anniversary of Typatone, I review what happened and look forward to what is to come.
In October of 2015, I released Typatone with music duo Lullatone at Ableton’s Loop Festival1. As a follow up to the surprise hit sensation Patatap from the year before, I wanted to use Typatone as a way to respond to how Patatap was received. In today’s post I cover the feedback I received for Patatap, the way I responded, and the subsequent reception of Typatone. Then, I go over some refinements that I am publishing today to set Typatone up for the next ten years of operation.
Typatone, A Response
According to Wikipedia, Patatap was released on March 25, 2014. Thanks to the subreddit r/InternetIsBeautiful Patatap found its way to audiences I could never have imagined. I traveled to Europe and Asia to share my experience making it. For a lot of people, it resonated in a way that I was trying to communicate.2 It spurred collaboration and custom projects with brands and bands I admire.3 I made new lifelong friends. All great things. However, in making its way into popular culture, there was another theme that marked the reception of Patatap: procrastination.4 Numerous articles and as many email inquiries flooded my inbox to ask how I made something so addictive. Coming from a place of reverence for artistic craft and process, this honestly shocked me. Unfortunately being human, I had a hard time letting go of what felt negative to me. I did not want people to procrastinate. And I did not want people to be addicted to Patatap. So, when Shawn of Lullatone pitched the follow up as an experience to type and make melodies from words, I thought long and hard. I took walks. I rode my fixed gear bike. I went to parties. I tried to gain some perspective. And, in a small room of the Ace Hotel in Midtown Manhattan while on a work trip, I started prototyping what would become Typatone.
My feeling was that the “addictive” element of Patatap were the arresting animations. When you type on the keyboard, you do not expect the screen to flash. I intended to subvert user expectations, but only to make the experience delightful or surprising. If those were themes that marked Patatap, then with Typatone I wanted the themes to be subtle and meditative. “Could something subtle even be appreciated today?” was a question that ran through my mind. Remember this was when Vine content was capped at 6 seconds. I asked Shawn if the sounds this time around could align with these desired themes. Could they be more focused, narrow? It is why most of the filters are pretty slow. The animations in Typatone (compared to Patatap at least) are also subtle. There is the sing-along style identity mark that bounces to whatever letter is triggering a note place. There is also the backdrop, a linear gradient representing the filter. But, it is also representing the time of day. Even the keyboard, which is an intentional UI element, shows expectation, but is mostly utilitarian in behavior. Lastly, the sound clip composition is a mix of Lullatone’s sensibility of melody mapped to Letter Frequency’s most common letters in the English language. These decisions were meant to create Typatone as a more purposeful, smaller, yet hopefully equally impactful experience as Patatap.
The results ended up being similar. After ten years of both apps runnings, it is safe to say the receptions were similar. Typatone, like Patatap, was met with a lot of delight. I get emails every month about how Typatone is used in school settings. Despite this impact, Typatone never received any critical acclaim. In an effort to justify my decisions, a year after Typatone’s release, I published an article describing the potential academic value of Typatone.5 In all, the disappointing results led me to apply to graduate school; to better understand how my work could fit in with art, games, and design.
The Next Ten Years
Looking back to my thoughts and my writing from the mid-2010s, I saw a lot of frustration. Today, I see now, that it was that frustration that was stunting me, not how people received it. Over the last four months I spent time updating the codebase and going over what I had created. My assessment today is much more lenient and positive. I am thankful that the app still runs! But, there were numerous changes that needed to be made in order for Typatone to endure for another ten years or more:
The technology stack was about to break. When Typatone was made, I implemented my friend’s Backend-as-a-Service product called Parse. Parse still works great. But, it interfaces with a lot of services that were once included with Parse’s for-profit services. So, I moved all the databases and created a unified API that all live in the same Google Cloud project where the application and CDN are hosted from. This reduces cost and complexity. Unfortunately, previously stored messages will not be backwards compatible.
This update does not, however, eliminate costs altogether. Like Uber ten years ago, Cloud Compute was practically free. Now, running Patatap and Typatone together runs me about $250 USD a month. Not much, but not nothing. For me to provide these applications “freely” (i.e: without advertising) I have always wanted to turn Typatone into a freemium model.
In order to present a freemium business model, I want to bring value to the customers who will be spending their money on this. After 5 years piloting the download-your-message-as-an-audio file feature Typatone, I am pleased to announced that this will be permanently supported starting with a price of $1.99 USD per message. I hope you will find this to be a straightforward transaction.
This price not only supports the hosting costs, but insures that whatever you purchase can be securely and permanently stored on my CDN. Now, you get an email receipt upon completing your purchase. The email includes a download link that is a permanent part of the project.
Despite these additions, I made considerations to keep Typatone anonymous. That means you do not need to login to any Typatone authentication or Jono LLC systems in order to create messages or use the application. This feels like the right balance of freemium for now. (Sidenote: if you are interested to hear me talk about the possible business models I considered, this post from last year was my thinking on it)
Looking back on the last ten years of Typatone’s life has been a rewarding experience. The project has positively altered my professional and artistic path. I learned a lot. And I made a lot of friends along the way. I am proud to have had the project run for as long as it has. I am even more excited to keep it going.
—Jono
In The Process: Inspiration Vs Stealing. Interview from Ableton Loop Summit. Ableton, 2015.
https://www.killscreen.com/what-do-flying-lotus-piet-mondrian-and-frank-lloyd-wright-have-common-app/. What do Flying Lotus, Piet Mondrian and Frank Lloyd Wright have in common? This app. Killscreen Magazine. August 6, 2024.
https://cornelius.patatap.com/. Patatap: Mellow Waves. Custom distribution of Patatap for Cornelius’s album. 2017.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2014/03/65375/patatap-turns-keyboard-into-sounds-images. Prepare To Spend Way Too Much Time With Patatap. Colleen Nika for Refinery29. March 30, 2014.
https://typatone.com/stats. Typatone: Statistical Analysis. July 19, 2016.