Home page - From here, users can link their Spotify account before selecting genres.
Results - Based on the user's selected genre and zip code, upcoming live concert info (artist name, date, SeatGeek link etc.) are generated.

SoundSearch

Inspiration

Ask yourself: what has been the worst part of being stuck at home in a pandemic? Online school? No traveling? Constant fear of death? Of course not! The worst part has been not being able to go to concerts! Duh! As we recover through this unprecedented time and resume many aspects of our lives, SoundSearch aims to restore our pre-pandemic concert-going ways by reconnecting its users to the live music scene!

Functionality

SoundSearch is not your regular live concert finder like Songkick or Bandsintown. It has a special feature that allows users to connect their Spotify account and get local shows recommended to them based on the musical genres they are interested in. Maybe you don’t know who exactly you want to see--only the kind of show you want to go to. SoundSearch does the brainstorming for you and returns a list of relevant options to choose from.

Technologies

SoundSearch is built with Flask, Bootstrap, and CSS/HTML/JS. On the backend, we perform OAuth authentication and API calls to the Spotify API, as well as API-key authentication and calls to the SeatGeek API in order to get all of our data in realtime. The frontend is built to be responsive and flexible using Bootstrap.

Challenges

Bootstrap was difficult because none of us had ever worked with it before--it took us a while to learn how to put together the classes and components we needed for each part of the website. Linking the front and back end of the web project was also difficult because we had very little experience using the Flask built-in Jinja templating language. Finally, accessing the Spotify API was challenging because it uses an Oauth authorization flow which we had never worked with before.

Accomplishments

We’re very proud to have a functional prototype to showcase. We achieved significant technical complexity: retrieving user input, using that input to stitch together data from two unique API’s, and then displaying that data for the user in an accessible and ascetic manner. While we did not achieve all of our desired functionality, we have left a strong foundation to build upon if we wanted to access the user’s Spotify in the future.

What's Next

In the future, we would like to implement recommendations based on the user’s followed artists, liked songs, and created playlists. This will make the app feel more personalized and provide a more unique service.

Built With

Submitted to

UofTHacks IX

Created by

In the frontend, I've worked on the page to get the user' location and collaborated with my teammate Rohit on the page that displayed live concert cards. This work made it possible to display tailored recommendations to the user. Working with my teammates on SoundSearch updated my JS/HTML knowledge and taught me how to link frontend with the Flask backend. I've also learnt how to collaborate on code through branching in Git.

James Chen
UofT CS 1st Year | TOPS '21 | Shad '20
I focused on implementing the backend of the site. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to use two external APIs, Spotify and SeatGeek. Spotify was particularly difficult because I had to follow an Oauth authorization flow, which I had never seen before. Flask was also a challenge because I had little prior experience in it. Nevertheless, the backend works as required and I'm very happy with how it turned out under the time and knowledge constraints!

Luke Cheseldine
Computer science student at the University of Toronto
Virendra Jethra
Comp Sci Student at McMaster University
Rohit Prakash

Updates

James Chen started this project — Feb 06, 2022 08:28 AM EST

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