Texas Tech faculty from the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts and the Department of Computer Science become entrepreneurs.

A daily music-guessing game hit the market on all app platforms in 2026. GeoListen opens with an interface presenting the globe; every day a new song from around the world is played, and players have five guesses to figure out its country of origin.

GeoListen’s aim is to offer a fun, quick daily game, like Wordle, that educates players about different sounds and music genres from around the world.

The new game came to life from research conducted at Texas Tech University’s Performing Arts Research Lab (PeARL) and with the help of Research Commercialization.

Research Commercialization serves Texas Tech University System researchers and innovators by identifying promising discoveries, securing intellectual property rights and helping move innovations from the laboratory to the marketplace. Put more simply, it helps Texas Tech get products or services to market.

However, the idea of GeoListen did not just magically appear; it took the right team, interdisciplinary work, years of collaboration and a great idea and design.

Coming to Texas Tech

In 2017, a physics lecturer at the University of Science, Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City (HCMUS-VNU), started to feel irked. 

“I wanted to be a better teacher,” Ngan Nguyen remembered thinking, “but I kept hitting the same wall; I could explain something on a graph, but I couldn’t make my students actually see it.”

Ngan had been in the scientific field her whole career, but her desire to develop as an educator pushed her to a place she could have never imagined.

While searching for an answer, Ngan discovered the world of data visualization, the process of turning raw numbers and spreadsheets into visuals, like charts and graphs, so people can understand information quickly and easily.

“That’s what got me. I didn’t expect something so technical, yet so beautiful,” Ngan said.

She was keen that this was the right way to help her students. She said physics students frequently face strong difficulties when learning from graphs because they struggle to bridge the gap between abstract mathematical representations and real-world physical processes.

So, Ngan left her country to pursue her master’s degree at Texas Tech in 2018. 

She joined Tommy Dang’s data visualization lab, hoping to make every second count. Her curiosity in the field stood out early on, so Dang added her as a developer in a series of research models being made for a collaboration with PeARL, led by Peter Martens and David Sears.

One of these models was the Music Informatics for Radio Across the Globe (MIRAGE), an open-access database and online dashboard that allows users to interact with and export metadata and musicological features from music on internet radio. It operates like IMDB, but for music.

At first, the interdisciplinary partnership was small, but it was a starting point for something much bigger.

The Research

Martens and Sears were interested in further developing their concept, but now the researchers wanted to understand how people perceived music. Therefore, PeARL tested how people relate certain sounds to geographical locations.

The hypothesis was that Texas Tech students would be proficient at geo-locating music due to their exposure to the traditional sounds of many cultures around the world through media like movies and video games, and having these sounds easily available via streaming services or websites.

Imagine someone watching a movie set in Japan and subconsciously learning to connect the onscreen setting with the unique sound of a shamisen, a traditional three-string Japanese instrument played with a long flat stick.

For this research to be successful, PeARL needed an easy-to-use interface to swiftly conduct their tests. Luckily, Ngan was the right person for the job.

She and the team created a simple interactive interface for the research, all based around a globe where participants had to pinpoint the origin of the song.

While the research was in its practical testing phase, Ngan finished her studies and graduated. She returned to Vietnam shortly after to continue teaching.

The Unexpected

During a weekly lab meeting at PeARL, where researchers and students present their new findings and data, the interactive globe software made its first appearance.

“I remember looking around the room; there were about eight people, including Sears, and we were like, ‘This looks really fun ...this looks like a game,’” Martens recalled.

Martens has devoted his career to music and research. He particularly investigates how musical rhythm works: how a composer writes a beat, a musician physically performs it, and a listener’s brain interprets it.

During the meeting, one of his students also pointed out how participants reacted to the experiments; they often asked for the playlist that was used or to go again. 

“‘Can I do a couple more?’ or ‘That was really fun,’ isn’t something you hear a lot when conducting experiments,” Martens said.

At that moment, Martens and Sears started to wonder if this research interface was something people would want to do, even if they weren’t getting paid.

GeoListen

Martens and Sears decided to trust their instincts in 2025 and began transforming the research into a game. They reached out to Ngan again, since she designed the interactive globe interface. Even though she was back in Vietnam, she loved the idea of continuing her previous work. 

The researchers transitioned into entrepreneurs and took their interface tool to Texas Tech’s Innovation Hub (iHub). They became part of the Accelerator Program, an intensive 12-month program that included monthly meetings with a team of industry mentors, monthly business courses led by expert speakers, and funding to help them complete their product and successfully launch their product.

The project was taken into iHub’s cohort nine, under the name of GeoListen.

“I didn’t expect this to happen at all; my path still confused everyone at home,” Ngan said. “But when I look back at every step, I realize it is all about the same thing: using technology to help people understand something better.”

Similar to the interface from the lab tests, GeoListen opens with a globe and a play button; the player hears the song of the day and has five guesses to find the right country of origin.

After 12 exciting months, the team successfully completed the project in 2026. The app was developed, the roles were assigned and the framework for success was set. 

“The founders of GeoListen stood out in the Accelerator Program because they were incredibly determined to make the most of every opportunity placed in front of them," said Taysha Williams, managing director of the Innovation Hub. “They came prepared, asked thoughtful questions, welcomed feedback and truly leaned into the mentorship and resources available to them. Their commitment to developing their product and turning their vision into a launched business was evident every step of the way.”

However, the team still needed to officialize their product. This led them to Research Commercialization, which solidified GeoListen as a real business and as an LLC.

“Texas Tech’s office has policies that are very advantageous to the entrepreneurs who are pursuing these things,” Martens said. 

Research Commercialization routes a portion of the money earned through the researchers’ products back to the colleges and the departments where the project originated.

“To me, as a faculty member and an entrepreneur, it's really motivating to do these sorts of things when you know that if it succeeds, I might put some money in my pocket myself, but I will also be supporting the parts of the institution that helped me do this in the first place,” Martens said.

The Release

GeoListen officially launched on March 1, 2026. 

What was once just a quick tool for university research became a real-world product, thanks to the university’s support and GeoListen’s highly motivated team.

To Martens, GeoListen is one of a kind. 

“It’s as if you are creating a piece of art. People may ask, ‘Why are you creating this?’” he said. “When creating art, you must believe that the world needs it. Obviously, you must have realistic ideas, but that belief is what pushes it." 

Martens’ ambition and care are what help drive the team to succeed, and they do not plan on stopping anytime soon.

He believes GeoListen’s story serves as an example to future students and faculty, highlighting how plausible the journey can be by utilizing Texas Tech’s commercialization ecosystem. 

Ngan emphasizes her hope for GeoListen to impact the Red Raider community.

“Two music professors and a computer science graduate student creating an app – our story has a lot of fields that rarely work together, so I hope students can learn from this and strive to create their own collaborations.

“GeoListen is proof that learning beyond theories, having hands-on opportunities and pursuing collaborations is what keeps you growing. This is what makes real impact in the community.”