Meet Muse: The App That Connects the Music You Love to Scripture — Winner of the Gloo × YouVersion New Frontiers Prize
Muse connects the music you already love to the Scripture that's been speaking to those same themes all along. It just won the $10,000 New Frontiers Prize from Gloo and YouVersion — here's what it does and how it works.
Last week, Gloo and YouVersion announced the winner of their first "Scripture in New Frontiers" Summer Challenge — a competition asking developers to bring the Bible into digital spaces where it rarely shows up natively. Out of 365 entrants and 75 submitted projects, our entry, Muse by Psalmlog, took home the $10,000 New Frontiers Prize.
Most submissions went where you'd expect a "new frontiers" challenge to go: gaming led the field, followed by social platforms, creator tools, and wearables. We went somewhere quieter — your music.
What Muse does
When something's weighing on us, most of us don't open a devotional. We open Spotify.
Muse starts there. Connect your Spotify (or paste in any single song), and in about thirty seconds it reads the human themes running underneath your recent listening — longing, restlessness, gratitude, holding on — and shows you where Scripture has been speaking to those exact themes for thousands of years. Each theme opens into a short reading: what people wrestle with there, a figure from Scripture who lived it, the passages themselves, and an open question to carry with you.
It never tells you how you feel. People love songs for the hook, the memory, the drive home — not because every song is their diary. So Muse describes what the songs are about and invites you to notice whether a theme is alive in you. An invitation, not a diagnosis.
When a reading lands, you can share it as a Muse Card — a Wrapped-style image built from your own listening — or carry the theme into a journal, where it can actually take root.
Gloo's announcement described Muse as "meeting people exactly where they are, using a habit they already have rather than asking them to form a new one." We couldn't have said it better — that sentence is also the entire thesis behind Psalmlog.
Here's the three-minute demo:
How it works, briefly
Under the hood, Muse is a small, open-source app with a clear division of labor.
Your listening is the input: recent tracks from Spotify, plus each song's key and mode as texture for how a theme feels. A staged chain of prompts, running on Gloo AI Studio, processes that context — what each song is about, the throughline across your listening, and which passages of Scripture meet each theme. The language model here isn't an oracle and isn't doing anything mystical; it's context-processing machinery, shaped by careful prompt engineering and a broad knowledge of Scripture, whose job is to read what's on the table and point.
And it only ever points. The model proposes a verse reference — an address, like Psalm 139:7-10 — and the actual words are fetched from the YouVersion Platform API, the same source behind the Bible App. Every verse you read in Muse arrives word-for-word as translated. Scripture speaks for itself.
One rule overrides everything else: when a song touches despair, self-harm, or abuse, Muse sets aside the tidy verse-matching, softens to gentle, conditional language, stays with a Psalm of presence, and surfaces a support resource. Tenderness over cleverness, built into the system.
What this has to do with Psalmlog
Psalmlog is a spiritual journaling app — a personal devotional for your real life. Everything we build starts from the same conviction: spiritual growth doesn't come from consuming more content. It comes from practice — from letting Scripture meet the actual texture of your days, and then doing something with what you hear.
Muse is that conviction in its smallest possible form. Your music is already a record of what you're carrying. Muse just makes the introduction — and when a theme strikes a nerve, its invitation is the same one Psalmlog makes every day: don't just read it. Sit with it, write about it, walk it out.
Try it
Muse is free, takes about thirty seconds, and doesn't require an account: muse.psalmlog.com. Connect Spotify or paste a single song, and see what's underneath your listening. And if you're ready to make reflection a practice, get started with Psalmlog.
Our thanks to the teams at Gloo and YouVersion — for the challenge, for the platforms that made a solo build like this possible in under a month, and for caring about where Scripture shows up next.
Preston Zeller is the founder of Psalmlog. Muse is open source at github.com/zellerhaus/muse_by_psalmlog.