UofT SoundSpace

We heard students want to explore more spaces that are either quiet or loud, and we can help them find these. Sound like a great idea?

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Inspiration

For University of Toronto students, the campus can be so large, that many times it can be difficult to find quiet spaces to study or louder spaces to spend some time with friends. We created UofT SoundSpace to help students find quiet and loud spaces around campus to help reduce conflicts between those who want to study and those who want to talk.

What it does

SoundSpace relies on having many students record small audio samples at different times to understand when spaces are the quietest or the loudest. Then, when a student needs to find a quiet place to work, or a loud environment to relax in, they can use the app to figure out what locations would be the best choice.

How we built it

We used Javascript, React Native, Python, GraphQL, and Flask. Our frontend was built with React Native for it to be cross-platform, and we sought to use Python to perform audio analysis to get key details about the audio average amplitude, volume spikes, or reverberation. These details would inform the user on what locations they would prefer.

Challenges we ran into

Many of the difficulties arose from the collaboration between the front-end and back-end. The front-end of the system works great and looks nice, and we figured out how to perform audio analysis using Python, but we ran into problems transferring the audio files from the front-end to the back-end for processing.

In addition, we ran into problems getting geo-location to work with React Native, as we kept getting errors from extraneous files that we weren't using.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learning new technologies and moving away from our comfort zones to try and build a practical project that can be accessible to anyone. Most of us had little experience with React Native and back-end development, so it was a valuable experience to work through our issues and put together a working product.

What's next for UofT SoundSpace

We want to have more functionalities that expand to more buildings, specific floors, and rooms. This can ultimately expand to more post-secondary institutions.

Here are a list of the things that we wanted to get done, but couldn't in the time span:

  • Login/Register Authentication
  • Connection between front-end and back-end
  • Getting the current geo-location of the user
  • Uploading our data to a database
  • Viewing all of the data on the map
  • Using Co:here to help the user figure out what locations are best (ex. Where is the quietest place near me? --- The quietest place near you is Sidney Smith.)

Sadly, our group ran into many bugs and installation issues with React Native that halted our progression early on, so we were not able to complete a lot of these features before the deadline.

However, we hope that our idea is inspiring, and believe that our app would serve as a solid foundation for this project given more time!

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