Linguana

Colliding cultures, unifying music.

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Inspiration

Tapping your feet to the rhythm of a music is an experience that's universal (almost as much as scrolling on your phone). It transcends linguistic barriers and somehow convinces people that they can dance. And yet, every language puts it's own unique spin of culture and unique heritage. We were brought together for a love for music and we wanted to capture that instinctive connection and explore it's multi-faceted forms in different langauges.

What it does

Iguana is a global music discovery tool that showcases top artists from four major regions—French, Spanish, Japanese, and German. The app fetches real-time data from the Spotify API, displays artist cards, and lets users explore their top tracks. When the Spotify API decides it has had enough for the day, the app gracefully falls back to local curated data so nothing breaks (except maybe your boredom).

How we built it

We built the frontend with React, TypeScript, Vite, and TailwindCSS. The backend is powered by FastAPI, handling all communication with the Spotify Web API. And gemini, eleven-lab as our AI support. For each genre, the backend fetches top artists, queries their top tracks, and returns a tidy JSON payload, before undergoing an AI pipeline to deliver cool music content to the user. The frontend then pulls everything together into a responsive UI with reusable components and genre-driven routing. In short: a lot of async functions, a lot of JSON, and a lot of “why is CORS doing this again?”

Challenges we ran into

Spotify API authentication that occasionally forgot we existed.

CORS issues that felt like debugging a ghost.

Git Merge issues that made us rage-break (taking a breaks out of rage. Sadly, couldn't break anything)

Designing a UI that still looked okay after several hours of sleep deprivation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A complete, fully functional, full-stack music discovery platform.

  • A clean and responsive UI with dynamic artist pages.

  • A resilience layer that keeps the app running even when external APIs fail.

  • Seamlessly connecting React, FastAPI, Spotify, ElevenLabs, Gemini, Manifest without losing our sanity.

  • A project that genuinely feels fun to use (and fun to show off).

and having fun :D

What we learned

A lot about API integrations

What's next for Linguana

Expand languages, bring immersive singing experiences from different cultures directly to the user.

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