Environment karaoke

A karaoke web app which generates alternative lyrics for popular songs to address topics such as climate and environment.

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Inspiration

Living in an era of information, we all have developed a high degree of resistance towards the influx of news about melting glaciers and pictures of plastic in the sea. This makes it ever harder to raise awareness of the climate, which we all contribute to - for the better or the worse. But what if there was a way to reach people of different ages and backgrounds, and to make it a fun and pleasant experience? Music has proven to be a very effective carrier of messages, being interwoven with many social movements throughout our history. A catchy tune can spread like wildfire, reach beyond the scope of the internet, not to say that it can get stuck in our heads for the next day. By combining it with a call for environment awareness we hope to boost the impact of the message and to reach a greater community.

What it does

The web application lets you sing your favourite songs in a different way. While the music stays the same, the lyrics are adapted to stress the beauty of nature and encourage a more sustainable lifestyle.

How we built it

The web application was built with ReactJS for the frontend and Flask for the backend, where we used the Youtube and Genius API for the extraction of audio files and song lyrics. For possible matches, we assembled a small database with lyrics of songs which focus on environment and climate change. To expand this data set, we used a natural language generator (GPT-2) which we fine-tuned on the collected lyrics. The matching was performed based on metrics such as the pronounciation and stress patterns of individual syllables.

Challenges we ran into

The sparsity of the lyrics database a great challenge, as it is an important factor for the goodness of fit of the synthesized text with the original. Also, we had to realize that the Youtube API has a very low quota for searches.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were a great team with diverse backgrounds, where everyone could contribute and shine in their own way.

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