Online celebrities come in all shapes and sizes. 3-year-old Dylan captured audiences across the internet a few years ago as his perfect pitch video went viral with 40+ million collective views to this day. Now 9 years old, Dylan has the perfect pitch, which only 1 in 10,000 people have, speaks three languages, and has an impressive memory.
Dylan’s father and CEO of Nuryl, Rick Beato, is a classically-trained musician and music producer who wanted to expose his first unborn baby to complex music while in the womb. Dylan was Nuryl’s first app tester, a music subscription app that delivers daily music lessons for babies and toddlers up to two years old to improve their cognitive development.
“I created playlists of this very specific type of original music and played it for my yet-to-be-born baby every day,” says Beato. “We kept doing it every day after Dylan was born until he was about two.” The music mobile app aims to stimulate the brain of the unborn baby, and later toddler, to develop an increased attention span and affinity for language development.
Beato talks to Hypepotamus about how your baby can benefit from Nuryl, its revenue model, and the feedback from its beta testers before the app launch on iOS and Android.
What problem are you solving?
Helping children during a critical window of opportunity during 5 months prenatal and 2 years of age. Science has proven that there is a link between early exposure to music. Nuryl takes this to the next level by using highly complex music, or what we call High Information Music, to help stimulate the areas of the brain directly tied to language.
Funding or bootstrapped:
Nuryl is bootstrapped at this time. As our users mount, we may be seeking additional funding, but we are privately funded.
How’d you get the idea for it?
I have a music background as a college professor as well as a music producer. I wondered if I played high information music for my kids when they were babies, if they would grow up and it sound normal to them. Not only did it sound normal to them, but they all three possess unique abilities in the areas of memory, language, and musical aptitude. I started playing high information music for my son at 5 months prenatal on a hunch that this unique music would then sound normal to him as he got older. Not only did it sound normal to him, but he started showing signs of enhanced memory, perfect pitch (the ability to instantly recognize individual notes and complex chords), and the ability to learn other languages with ease.
How does Nuryl benefit babies?
Nuryl is a listening app for high information music it was either created for now or hand chosen for its melodic and harmonic properties. We play this music for babies, which registers in the same areas of the brain as language. Nuryl is designed to stimulate these areas during a period of time when a baby’s brain is developing the most rapidly.
You mentioned you used it on your first born. Can you expand on how it helped his pitch?
All three of my children have some degree of perfect pitch. I created a series of mini music lessons that are now a part of the app which go through the entire scale and put names to the notes that they are hearing in the music. This helps to label these notes that they’re constantly hearing. As they get older, they are able to name these notes by ear. I posted a video of Dylan demonstrating these abilities that received a total of 30 million views. To date, his videos now have over 40 million views with hundreds of thousands of comments from people all over the world.
How do studies show that music benefits babies?
There are many recent studies on music in the brain that prove the links between early music exposure and higher cognitive abilities. Research shows that babies begin learning while still in womb, conditioning themselves to their world before entering it. And this learning can arise from listening, a sense that can reach beyond the womb’s protective cocoon to sample the outside world.
The auditory system develops early on, with evidence of hearing by the 16th week of pregnancy. By the third trimester, babies can discern subtle complexities and variations in sounds from outside the womb. This is when listening-based learning begins.
What’s your revenue model?
We are a subscription service. The subscription to Nuryl is $9.99 a month and $89.99 for a full year. Users with the full featured app have access to 29 playlists with over 600 musical pieces, half of which were created for Nuryl and cannot be found anywhere else in the world.
What has been the response so far from the beta testers?
We had over 5000 beta testers in just a few short months before our official launch in May 2016. Many of our beta users wrote in stating they could see a difference in their child’s alertness and focus within weeks of using the app. Nuryl will continue to monitor the metrics of usage and survey users now that the app is live.
Who are your competitors and how do you stand out?
To our knowledge, there is nothing like Nuryl in the marketplace. As mentioned, half of our musical pieces were arranged in the studio. Many months of recording, mixing, and mastering were spent coming up with unique pieces that were specifically designed to use what we call, High Information Music, to help boost areas of the brain that are most active in, what scientist call, the 1,000 day critical window of development from 5 months prenatal to two years of age.
