Connectify

Inspiration

Belonging is a fundamental part of being human: We are hardwired for connection. With the need for social distancing during the pandemic, we felt firsthand the need for social connection to live healthier and happier lives. And to fill this need, one of the first things we turned to is music.

Music is a powerful tool that can bring individuals together, promote trust and empathy, reduce stress and anxiety, and facilitate social bonding (Koelsch, 2013; Harvey, 2017). Music is a collective experience that can overcome physical distance, and we saw this in the early days of the pandemic as the world watched Italians emerging onto their balconies to sing the national anthem and other songs together and played instruments.

Many studies have shown that certain personality traits are linked to music. People with similar taste in music are more likely to like each other as they feel they understand one another through their choice of music.

That's why we developed an app that would uniquely connect people via the music they listen to.

What it does

Connectify takes your Spotify playlist and suggests people you can connect and chat with who share similar music tastes. It also matches you based on your intent, whether you're interested in connecting with potential dates, having casual conversations in small groups, or discovering people and nonprofits who care about similar issues in real-time chat.

How we built it

We used React for front end, Flask for back end, AWS for hosting, storage, database, and lambda functions.

Challenges we ran into

We generated fake Spotify users and recognize that without deploying online and then having actual users connecting with their Spotify app to this that we cannot truly test the waters and determine how effective we are at matching people with similar music interests.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did not back down on achieving an ambitious idea in the time span given for this hackathon and made progress on fulfilling our learning goals for the weekend. We truly believe this idea has merit with more time to refine and test, so we pursued it without hesitation.

What we learned

We learned how to work with spotify API and the inner workings of how recommendation systems work. For some of us without any front end experience, we gained exposure and experience to coding a React front end.