Inspiration
What do Kanye’s All Falls Down, Dua Lipa’s Love Again, and Beyonce’s Break My Soul have in common? They’re all critically acclaimed songs– that recycle sounds from less popular songs! This practice, called sampling, is an essential tool for record producers, especially in the dominant genres of pop and hip hop. But, aspiring producers (like Eric on our team) just don’t have the money to buy the rights to sample popular songs and are always looking for more obscure records that’ll set their music apart from the crowd. Unfortunately, most applications only show the most popular songs. We wanted to empower aspiring producers like Eric to have the smoothest sailing journey in finding the right type of records to sample.
Furthermore, we wanted to take this idea one step further. Talent is everywhere but opportunity is not. Eric also finds difficulty in meeting other people like him and sharing musical ideas. We want to foster a community for aspiring producers like him, who aren’t lucky enough to have the connections. By doing so, we create a more interconnected world where music production becomes much more accessible, and the world gets to meet more awesome music to rock-n-roll!
What it does
The user can ask the app to generate songs with important information like its tempo, genre, popularity, and music key. This allows aspiring artists like Eric to easily find the songs he wants to use to make music samples. Users only need to have a Spotify account, and they can play the songs right on the web app, and save songs on spotify.
To allow more aspiring music artists to connect and inspire one another, our app provides a simple messaging platform that’s as simple as a click away. Users can choose to connect with others and start chatting with them. Since a web app is generally less accessed compared to phone applications, we chose to remind users by sending a notification message right to their phone when someone contacts them via the web app.
Furthermore, users can choose to gift NFTs to other aspiring music producers. Whether you want to be a good Samaritan for the community, or you want to ask a fellow producer to sample music of your choice, the user can be redirected to opensea.io where they can gift NFTs.
How we built it
For the frontend of the app, we used Vue to replicate our Figma wireframe. We stored account information in a MongoDB server and used Pymongo to interact with its data, including creating new accounts and fetching its information. To get music given the needed parameters of the user, we used the SpotifyAPI for Python. We connected the backend and the frontend using FastAPI. We used websockets for the messaging.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was that all our team members had different sets of skills, and had never really worked with the same technologies that one another have. It was a difficult journey to integrate all the different technologies together, but it ended up benefiting us as the project became much more complex, in a good way.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Eric is our team member who is an aspiring music producer. He proposed the app idea initially, and he is super happy with the result. He claims that the app will really come in handy to solve his problem with finding more obscure songs and connecting with other artists. People like him are our intended users and we are really proud to know that the product can serve its purpose.
What we learned
We were really surprised that there was a Spotify API that could provide for all the needed information, and we enjoyed learning how to use it. It would definitely be useful for future projects relating to music. It was also our first time using Twilio, and it was an amazing tool to send SMS messages.
What's next for SamplEasy MusiChat
It would benefit users greatly if we made it more intuitive for users to connect to each other. Perhaps a ‘follower’ feature (like in social media apps such as LinkedIn or Instagram) can prove helpful so that users can be recommended to follow other aspiring artists they might know. Moreover, a ‘posting’ system (such as Instagram posting) could be implemented, allowing users to showcase their latest music project, such as their newest music sampling project. The gifting NFTs feature could also be made more smooth by creating a built-in feature to gift NFTs more easily.
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