The Choral Hub is a platform whose mission is to get the whole world singing again. Our first product is a gaming app called tchzant (currently in alpha testing) to support people on their singing journey, regardless of experience. The app takes you on a learning journey similar to Duolingo or can teach you specific songs based on your interests. With this app, The Choral Hub hopes to increase accessibility to music education and to improve mental wellness through mobile gaming.
Tchzant is the first gaming app of its kind within the singing education tech industry. This free app not only provides the users with a variety of fun games, teaching musical skills and songs simultaneously but also encourages users to build the habit of singing even just a little bit every day for positive wellness.
Currently, most singing education applications are limited in scope: either they only teach a few skills or only set a number of songs without teaching the skills needed to sing them. Our app does both. The user gets the win of learning a song whilst also developing their overall musicianship.
Moreover, gaming is under wielded within the adult singing education space. We hope to disrupt this market by applying real gaming techniques to lower barriers to entry and to increase engagement and retention.
Our path to user growth will be built on partnerships with organisations both within and outside of the music industry. Within music we’ll partner with organisations with experience either supporting people’s wellbeing through music or focused on increasing participation within the arts. Outside of music we will aim to partner with larger organisations who support the mental health and wellbeing of their employees particularly from the social impacts of COVID-19 through a variety of activities.
In the first year we want to support brands exclusively in the UK with hopes to expand to new markets globally next year. Collaborating with other globally scaling non-music focused brands will enable us to reach a wider audience and increase our potential impact amongst non-singers.
We started building in May 2020 with a simple web-based prototype to help choir singers learn music for their rehearsals in a skills-focused, kinesthetic teaching approach. We ran a massive market research project across a number of different touchpoints (regional, adjacent markets, age, genre interest) and through this, realised that our impact could be greater if we started with 101 level users (people who sing but don’t consider themselves singers) and opened our genre offering to include songs to sing on your own as well as harmonies to sing in a group. Our alpha app is built in a way that allows our users to learn a wide variety of songs in a variety of genres, and to build up the skills and confidence to sing wherever they want.
Right now (mid-June 2021), tchzant is in its alpha phase having finished several rounds of user testing supported by Innovate UK funding. We are in the process of moving from alpha into beta with plans to launch our beta in July 2021.
In our first year with the app live we plan to spend most of our growth efforts partnering with brands across the UK targeting different potential audiences across diverse demographics and musical interests spaces. Our core focus in the early days is to increase accessibility to music education, curating a system that is truly inclusive of different genres and learning paces. And to delve deeper into building valuable wellness across the board. With this work when we scale globally, this means that there will be a higher impact at the core of our offering.
We believe that being a CIC CreaTech One to Watch 2021 will help us reach a wider audience, enabling our impact from year one to be that much greater. User data is key to the successes of our tech, so reaching a number of diverse groups in the early days will be the focus of our engagement efforts. We believe in collaboration over competition, and so we believe the CIC CreaTech platform will enable complementary growth across the digital creative tech space. Collaborating with other future tech businesses will be possible in a bigger way through this platform and help us on our mission to get the whole world singing again.
