The challenge
Uniting music and memory? That’s exactly what BBDO and Stichting Alzheimer Onderzoek (SAO) did for their “Sing for Alzheimer’s” campaign. To make their idea come to life, BBDO approached our venture nocomputer for the execution of the technical part. Based on designs from BBDO, our team got to work and built a highly interactive web application from scratch—powered by artificial intelligence.
This campaign revolves around Nicole and Hugo, two Belgian singers that have become beloved musical icons over the years. Regrettably, as it impacts one in three women, Nicole was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, changing her life drastically. This disease, known for its relentless erosion of memories, gradually impacted Nicole, slowly fading the vibrant lyrics of her songs. As the disease progressed, the fear of forgetting her own songs led her to rely on autocues — a poignant symbol of the impact of Alzheimer’s disease.
Given these life-changing events, her partner Hugo became SAO’s new ambassador. Inspired by Nicole’s story, SAO, BBDO, and Hugo created a meaningful campaign: a platform that uses music as a bridge to connect, educate, and gather support for Alzheimer’s research.
Armed with designs from BBDO, the nocomputer team was entrusted with translating this touching narrative into an interactive web application. One that could engage, resonate, and inspire action. One that would make Belgians reflect on their own memory and understand the effects of Alzheimer’s in an interactive way.
Based on this story, BBDO designed an application where users could have a karaoke experience. The idea was to show the lyrics of, for instance, “Goeiemorgen, morgen” and erase certain words, which users could then sing. If all gaps were filled in correctly, they would get a score and could donate that amount of money to SAO if they wished to.
Our team built the application based on BBDO’s designs. To ensure a seamless and user-friendly experience, we focused on developing the application as intuitively as possible so the experience would be clear and enjoyable for users of all ages.
However, the truly innovative part of this case was the integration of artificial intelligence (Whisper AI) to enable a seamless karaoke experience. We implemented this speech-to-text feature to transcribe the lyrics with remarkable speed and accuracy. This feature was key in making the karaoke experience as immersive as possible — the users sing, and the AI would recognize, transcribe, and score their singing in real-time.
This technology is truly cutting-edge. Such advanced Dutch speech-to-text transcription would have been a dream one year ago. Thanks to the rapid advancements in AI technology, we could implement and optimize it to fit our project’s needs.
To top off the campaign, we allowed users to convert their ‘memories’ (scores) into donations. We did this by carefully integrating a secure and user-friendly donation flow at the end of the process. This ensured users were guided from the interactive karaoke experience to a straightforward donation process, supporting much-needed Alzheimer’s research.
Want to sing for Alzheimer’s as well? Visit the website here.
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