AmplifyHER

Inspiration

We were inspired to create this project because we realized that female, non-binary, and GNC individuals were underrepresented in almost every field, including music. This inspired us to create a playlist generator that gave users a playlist with only songs by artist of this underrepresented group of people.

What it does

Our website prompts the user to pick an option from a list of preselected genres to give them a new playlist. It filters through a gender dataset that provides us with information about artists gender identity and made it so that only female, non-binary, and GNC individuals would be added to the generated playlists.

How we built it

We utilized a combination of JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and Python in order to create our website. First we used JavaScript and HTML/CSS in order to create the foundation of our website and create a uniformed theme throughout our project. We then utilized python and Spotify's developer API along with Chartmetric's Pronoun and Gender dataset in order generate a playlist that comprised of songs by female, non-binary, and GNC individuals.

Challenges we ran into

We faced multiple challenges during this project as we were new to creating a website that integrates Python. We researched how to integrate Python into our site and, although we had to adjust our original plan of personalized quizzes, we adapted by curating playlists based on user-selected genres. Another challenge we encountered was the lack of female, non-binary, and GNC artists available in the music dataset we filtered through. This led to shorter playlists in some cases and exemplified the broader issue of underrepresentation of these groups across industries, including the music industry.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that we were able to complete a lot of what we set out to do at the beginning of this hackathon even though this was our first time creating a project of this measure. We continued working on the project even though we got stuck multiple times and we were often able to figure out how to resolve our issue. We were also skeptical about how likely it would have been to only include female, non-binary, and GNC individuals in our generated playlist but we ended up finding and figuring out how to implement a dataset into our project. We also adjusted our plan to fit the time restraints in order to better suit our needs.

What we learned

We learned a lot throughout the duration of this hackathon. We started off with limited knowledge of how to implement Python with HTML/CSS and JavaScript. As we researched and worked on the project, we learned how to integrate Python into the HTML and CSS to enhance our website's functionality. We also learned how to import and filter through a dataset.

What's next for AmplifyHER

For the future of AmplifyHER, we aim to integrate our Python code with Spotify’s API to generate actual Spotify playlists for users. We also plan to incorporate a larger dataset of female, non-binary, and GNC artists, allowing for a broader selection of songs, including more diverse and niche genres. Most importantly, we hope to raise greater awareness and recognition for these underrepresented artists so their work can be more widely appreciated.