Bumpify

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Inspiration

We wanted to make something funny and entertaining, while learning new technologies such as recurring neural networks along the way.

What it does

Bumpify is an AI for generating rap lyrics, using a recurring neural network model which has learned from the lyrics to Billboard hits in the "Hip-hop/R&B" category from 2016-2018.

How we built it

We scraped our relevant songs from Billboard charts using a Python library we found on GitHub, then used another Python library we found which incorporates the Genius API to search for lyrics to those songs, and compiled a corpus for our AI to learn from in the form of a text file of all the raw text to every unique song. We used a recurring neural network Python library to generate a model based on this corpus, learning the ways in which commonly used words are ordered, to generate our own rap songs. We parse the AI's output and create a structured, better-formatted song from it, automatically creating line breaks and hooks for each song.

Challenges we ran into

To create our lyrics corpus, we originally were scraping data from azlyrics.com, however in the middle of running our program to add lyrics for each song to the corpus, our connection with the server was interrupted. It turned out that azlyrics blocked our network due to numerous repeated requests. Currently, hosting our AI on our domain name is our biggest challenge, although it is fully functional locally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of training a recurring neural network to generate somewhat coherent lyrics based on a corpus with real-world relevancy that we built ourselves, as we were previously unfamiliar with this technology.

What we learned

We learned that it takes a very long time to train a neural network, and that the model created will be far too large to host on many web services. We also learned to use several interesting Python libraries that we discovered on public GitHub repositories. One member learned Python programming, which he was previously not very familiar with.

What's next for Bumpify

The Bumpify staff will be working tirelessly to get the AI hosted on our domain at bumpify.org so that the power of tomorrow's rap hits will be in the hands of anybody with a mouse and Internet connection! Furthermore, we would like to enhance our techniques for generating a song structure based on the string of words that our API spits out, in ways such as separating lines more reasonably to isolate coherent thoughts, and allowing for a greater variety of hook structures. Once we get Bumpify hosted on our web domain, we could also implement a feature where users can save their favorite AI-generated songs to a public list of creations, so everybody can see the best of what Bumpify can offer.