When Ivor Williams and Alex Rothera were teenagers, they both suffered the loss of friends, through suicide and a car accident. Through their experiences, they understood the need for young people to express themselves in a meaningful way. And they also understood that sometimes words just aren’t enough.

Using their background as designers and technologists, Williams and Rothera founded Humane Engineering, a tech company that makes products to improve people’s everyday lives. Their first creation is an app that solves that problem of not having the words to articulate different emotions. Cove is a “musical journal” that lets adolescents create musical loops based on different moods that they can save to a journal or share with others.

“Cove is purposefully designed to de-stigmatise emotional health problems, and is unlike a traditional music-maker,” the company said in a statement. “A water and stone visual language is used instead of instrumental keys or musical notations. Relating feelings and mood to music is less imposing than writing notes or talking.”

Heather Servaty-Seib, a counseling psychologist and professor at Purdue University, told Wired that kids don’t always have the psychological means to process emotions verbally. Music, then, becomes a more tangible tool for kids to express themselves. “Music allows people to get below what they might be consciously aware of,” she said.

Here’s how Cove works. Choose from six different emotions to set the tone of the song: playful, calm, longing, clouded, gentle and struggling. Form musical patterns, like the base and melody, by dropping stones into the water. You can then change the overall sound with filters. Once you’re done, you can save it to your journal where you can type in any thoughts you want to add.

Cove is a fairly simple app — simple enough that anyone who doesn’t have a music background can create their own sounds. And the design, with tranquil shades of blue, is also calming. The interface can be a little glitchy at times, but once you get past that, the loops you make and save really can be an emotional outlet. It’s currently available for iOS.

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