Second year BMud student Henry Balme has been awarded second prize and £2,000 in the Big Ideas Competition, along with his team partner Arun Frey (a second year Media and Sociology Student). The Big Ideas Competition is sponsored by CitySpark—a City University programme that enhances employability by teaching participants the enterprise skills essential to building a successful business.

Balme and Frey’s winning project is Orfeo: a music player designed to store and organise digital collections of classical music.

As part of CitySpark’s autumn term workshops, the team put together a business plan that eventually led to a pitch to a panel of entrepreneurs. In the role of potential investors, the panel graded each of the twelve participating teams that made it to the final round — a scene that reminded the two second year students of the BBC series Dragon’s Den.

Balme and Frey conceived Orfeo when they realised that iTunes, the predominant music library software on the market, is not able to cater to the complicated structure of classical music. After the awards ceremony, Frey summarised the problem: “try to compress Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen Tetralogy with iTunes’ sorting options ‘Songtitle/Artist/Album/Genre/Year/Songwriter’. By point you’ve reached the Walküre you’ll be pretty annoyed.”

After searching to find music library software that is suited to the unique structure of the complicated genre of classical music, the two friends decided that they needed to step up to the plate themselves.

Balme and Frey have  will use the prize money to fund development of the software over the coming summer.