MaMuMi: Mapping the Music of Migration

MaMuMi “Mapping the Music of Migration” is a two-year European, Erasmus+ musical inheritance project focused on talking about music and song as a tool for intercultural competency. It involves the collection, editing and uploading of “Song Stories”, stories about music to an interactive app. I came on to this project along with 3 other students to develop the Music Migration Map app.

The app was developed entirely using JavaScript. It uses a Node.js / Express and simple HTML and JS on the frontend. The map view uses the Google Maps API. I took the lead on the overall system design, and also devised a solution that permitted the pin to animate across the map while staying syncronised with the playing song story.

The purpose of the app is to play the collected song stories while showing the migrant's journey on a map. When a song story has finished playing, the line representing the journey persists on the map so that when all stories are played, the map will be criss-crossed with lines for all the migrant journeys.

A content management system was required so the song stories could be input by project leadership. As the site does not have to be regularly updated, a simple JSON file using lowdb was used for persistence.