Part 1: When Music Meets Mindfulness: Finding My Why
A three-part blog series sharing my learnings based on concept created as part of TYE Entrepreurship program in Boston along with my team members.
The Moment Everything Changed
I'll never forget the day I realized something was deeply wrong.
It was a regular Tuesday afternoon in my sophomore year. I was sitting in the cafeteria, scrolling through Instagram between bites of lunch, when I saw it—another post. This time from a classmate I'd known since middle school, sharing their struggle with anxiety. The comments were filled with heart emojis and "you're not alone" messages. And they weren't wrong. She wasn't alone.
Over the next few weeks, I started noticing a pattern. The stress posts. The mental health awareness reposts. The subtle cries for help disguised as memes. It was everywhere, and it wasn't just my school. It was my generation.
As a high school senior now looking back, I realize that was the moment Tunology was born—even though I didn't know it yet.
Meet David and Ginny: The Faces Behind the Statistics
Let me introduce you to two people who would change how I thought about mental health forever.
David is a dad. His son is in 10th grade—my friend, actually. Over the past year, David watched his once-energetic, social son become withdrawn. Lost interest in basketball. Stopped hanging out with friends. Explosive anger over small things. David felt helpless. He looked into mental wellness coaches, but the affordable options? They didn't exist. The ones that did exist cost more than his monthly car payment.
Ginny is 19. A college freshman drowning in academic pressure. She turned to music and journaling as her escape—her therapy when she couldn't afford actual therapy. It helped, but she was doing it alone, with no guidance, no structure, and no community of people who understood what she was going through.
These weren't characters in a case study. These were real people in my life, representing millions of others.
The statistics were staggering:
- 50 million Americans are experiencing mental health issues
- 27 million aren't receiving any mental health resources
- 4 million teenagers and young adults (ages 12-25) are falling through the cracks completely
But here's what really got me: we live in the most connected generation in human history. We have apps for everything. Food delivery, meditation, fitness, language learning, even apps to remind us to drink water. So why were David and Ginny—and millions like them—still struggling alone?
The Research Rabbit Hole
Being a naturally curious person (some might say obsessive), I did what any teenager would do: I dove deep into research. Late nights, countless browser tabs, academic journals I barely understood but read anyway.
And that's when I discovered something remarkable: music therapy.
Not just "listening to music to feel better," but actual, clinical, evidence-based music therapy. The science was incredible:
- 41% of patients with insomnia reported improved sleep quality through music therapy
- 38% of children with disabilities showed increased social interaction
- 72% of patients with schizophrenia became more responsive to treatment
Music wasn't just making people feel good—it was literally changing their brain chemistry. It triggered dopamine (the "feel good" chemical), released endorphins (happiness), reduced cortisol (stress hormone), and even boosted Immunoglobulin A (cells that fight viruses).
There was a quote I came across from Yo-Yo Ma, the famous cellist, that stopped me in my tracks:
"Music can heal the wounds which medicine cannot touch."
I thought about Ginny using music instinctively to cope. I thought about all the times I'd put on my favorite playlist when I was stressed about exams or overwhelmed by college applications. We were already doing this—using music as medicine—we just weren't doing it effectively.
Wait, Doesn't This Already Exist?
Naturally, I thought I couldn't be the first person to think of this. So I started exploring existing mental wellness apps.
Calm - Beautiful, calming, great for meditation. But it cost $70/year and didn't really focus on music or personalization. It was more about guided meditation.
Finch - Cute, gamified, made mental wellness feel less scary. But it was also $70/year, and again, music wasn't the core focus.
Spiritune - This one actually used music! But it was self-managed (no intelligent recommendations), and it was expensive at $180/year.
I realized something important: the existing solutions were either too expensive, too generic, or too complicated. None of them were made by someone who understood what it was like to be a teenager in 2024, juggling AP classes, college applications, social pressure, and an uncertain future—all while trying to maintain some semblance of mental wellness.
None of them spoke to us.
The Lightbulb Moment
It happened during one of those late-night study sessions—you know the ones, where you're supposedly studying for a calculus test but you're really just thinking about everything else in your life.
I was listening to my carefully curated "focus" playlist on Spotify when it hit me:
What if we could combine the evidence-based benefits of music therapy with the personalization of Spotify, the affordability that teens actually need, and the community support that makes us feel less alone?
What if we could use AI to create personalized wellness schedules that incorporated music therapy, but made it accessible, fun, and—here's the key—actually affordable?
What if someone experiencing stress at 3 PM on a Tuesday could get a notification suggesting a specific type of music, paired with a journaling prompt, tailored to their exact emotional state?
What if David's son could join an affinity group with other teens who loved basketball and were dealing with similar struggles?
What if Ginny could track her mood patterns and see—with real data—that her music journaling actually was making a difference?
From "What If" to "Why Not Me?"
Here's the thing about being a high schooler with a big idea: there's this voice in your head that says, "You're just a kid. What do you know about building an app? About mental health? About entrepreneurship?"
But then there's another voice—a stronger one—that asks: "Why not me?"
I was closer to the problem than most adults. I understood the language, the platforms, the pain points. I knew what my generation needed because I was my generation.
I didn't need a PhD in psychology to recognize that my friends were hurting. I didn't need an MBA to know that $180/year was out of reach for most teenagers. I didn't need to be a developer to imagine what a better solution could look like.
What I needed was to start. To learn. To try.
That's when I discovered the TYE (Turn Your Idea into Reality) Entrepreneur program. Here was an opportunity to take this nebulous "what if" floating around in my head and actually build something real.
The Question That Started It All
If you take away anything from Part 1 of this journey, let it be this:
Every major innovation starts with someone noticing a problem and refusing to accept that "this is just how things are."
For me, that problem was watching my generation suffer in silence, unable to access the mental health support we desperately needed, while the therapeutic power of music—something we already loved and used daily—remained untapped and unstructured.
I didn't have all the answers. I still don't. But I had a question:
What if we could redefine mental wellness through the power of music?
That question would lead me to assemble a team, build a product, conduct customer research, pitch to advisors, and learn more about business, technology, and myself than I ever thought possible.
In Part 2, I'll take you behind the scenes of actually building Tunology—from assembling my founding team to designing our first MVP, from customer validation to understanding burn rates, and all the messy, exciting, terrifying moments in between.
But first, I had to find my "why."
And now I had it: Because David, Ginny, and millions of others deserved better. Because music could heal. Because someone had to try.
Why not me?