App that turns humming into music wins Vietnamese student meeting with Apple's Tim Cook

Le Nhat Hoang, 22, was the only Vietnamese among 50 Distinguished Winners of Apple's Swift Student Challenge this year, earning the Hanoi student a trip to its Worldwide Developers Conference in California.

Apple chose the 350 Swift Student Challenge winners from 37 countries and territories, then invited the 50 standouts, including Hoang, a final-year computer science student at Hanoi University of Science and Technology, to a three-day program at Apple Park in Cupertino during WWDC 2026, held June 8-12.

His winning app, HumMelody, records a melody as the user hums it and converts the sound into MIDI notes on screen in real time, which can then be played back on instruments such as guitar, piano, violin or flute.

"Many music lovers have good ideas but don't know how to express them, so I wanted to make an app that acts as a bridge, turning the ideas in their heads into something they can hear and feel," Hoang said.

The app uses a pitch-detection algorithm to read the hummed melody, and a visual editor lets users drag, delete or move individual notes before replaying the piece.

Hoang wrote it in Swift, the programming language Apple introduced in 2014, and built it entirely on Apple's own frameworks without third-party libraries. To work out how to edit notes after recording, he studied how professional tools such as GarageBand, Logic Pro and FL Studio handle the problem.

Trained in software but not in audio, Hoang said he leaned on AI to build the melody-conversion algorithm. "The main functions are complete, but the algorithm still needs improvement," he said, noting that the note-slicing is not yet smooth, which can leave the output disjointed. Refining that, especially chord processing, is his next goal.

Le Nhat Hoang poses at the entrance to Apple Park with his pass for WWDC 2026. Photo by VnExpress/Tuan Hung

Unexpected ticket to the U.S.

The result landed in Hoang's inbox in the early hours of March 27. Half-awake, he said he opened his laptop and logged in several times to be sure it was real.

"Mom, I'm about to go to America," he recalled telling his mother when she returned at 7:30 a.m. from taking his younger sibling to school.

She was stunned. Her son had never been abroad, was still finishing his degree, and she had not even known he had entered the contest.

Hoang said he had followed the Swift Student Challenge for more than five years, tracking Apple events since the Covid-19 period, but only entered this year, as a personal experiment with no real expectations.

"I didn't even dare to think I'd be among the 350 winners, but in the end I made the top 50," he said.

By that evening he was already researching what he would do in the U.S. and looking up flights to send to the organizers, even though he had neither a passport nor a U.S. visa.

Vietnam on the WWDC stage

For Hoang, the highlight was not only the trip but seeing his country surface repeatedly at one of the technology industry's biggest events.

"I was glad to attend WWDC, but even prouder that Vietnam was mentioned so much, through images of Hanoi, pho and Apple Intelligence's Vietnamese-language support," he said after the June 8 keynote.

Meeting Cook and Ternus, who is set to take over as Apple's chief executive on Sept. 1, was "an unforgettable memory, because it's not easy to meet two leaders of a top technology company at once," Hoang said.

He argued that Apple's large ecosystem and user base make the App Store fertile ground for young Vietnamese developers. "For anyone who wants to write apps for the Apple ecosystem, Swift is the optimal, intuitive choice and well worth learning," he said.

Hoang now plans to focus on finishing his degree, with the win leaving him more confident about a future as a professional app developer.