Project$ cat projects/nac-virtual-accompanist.md
NAC Virtual Accompanist
A mobile app that plays full organ accompaniments for hymns, so congregations without an organist can still sing.
- Status
- Proof of concept
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Design, development, audio pipeline
- Stack
- Flutter · Dart · Riverpod · just_audio · Python · FluidSynth
Many New Apostolic Church congregations in Southern Africa, especially rural ones, have no organist. When nobody can play, hymn singing suffers or the service has to work around the gap.
The Virtual Accompanist gives a worship leader a phone or tablet that can run the whole musical side of a service: build a service order ahead of time, choose how many verses to sing, include or skip intros and postludes, and then step through hymn by hymn with a pause between each so the leader stays in control.
How it works
Accompaniments start life as the official hymnal scores. Each hymn is exported to MIDI, split into intro, verse and postlude sections, and rendered through FluidSynth with an organ SoundFont into gapless audio. The app itself is Flutter with Riverpod for state, just_audio for playback and Hive for saving services on the device.
Status
A proof of concept with twelve sample hymns, running on Android and ready for iOS. The next steps are swapping the test audio for the real hymnal exports, finding a better pipe-organ SoundFont, and pitching the full catalogue to the church’s head office.