Why every song gets its own cover

A song you love has a face. You picture its cover before you remember its title. So from the start, every song made on Midhull gets a cover of its own.

Real photographs

We decided early not to generate a picture for every song. Instead we built a library of licensed photographs by photographers on Pexels, chosen and graded for music: rain on a window for a sad song, a city at night for city pop, marigolds for a wedding in Delhi.

One direction per sound

Each genre, mood and culture has its own art direction: the typefaces it uses, how the title sits, the tint, the crop and the grain. A rock cover hits hard in heavy capitals. A lullaby is quiet, with a lot of air. A Japanese title can run vertically, the way it would on a record sleeve in Tokyo.

One of one

The song itself decides the cover. Its title, genre, mood and words pick the direction and the photo, and a seed made from the song chooses the rest. The same song always gets the same cover. A different song gets a different one.

When someone answers your song with one of their own, the two covers meet on one square: yours on one side, theirs on the other. And because the app takes its colour from the cover you’re playing, every song changes the room a little.