hearMe

Inspiration

Before the start of the hackathon we saw a street musician at Alexanderplatz and were enjoying his performance. Once he left, we wanted to continue exploring street music culture of Berlin and didn't know where to go. That's why we came to the idea: wouldn't it be great to have a service that shows you street musicians nearby and pointing you to them? It also can be very useful for musicians trying to find their audience and gain popularity.

What it does

Basically, our service consists of two applications: one for musicians and one for their listeners. Musicians can add their performances on the map so that users can easily find them, learn more about genres they are playing and the time when they can be found. We also added ability to direct them to the most crowded places in the city so that can reach as more listeners as possible.

Listeners can easily find closest musicians to them and get a guided tour of artists in the specific radius. But we didn't stop here, we also added ability to scrape social networks like Instagram to find the most recent posts in the specific location and use machine learning to determine if there are any musicians in the pictures to add them on the map independently in case of musician doesn't know about our app. They can also donate them money via our app which means no more need in cash.

How we built it

For now we built an Android application using Kotlin and backend microservices in Python communicating via gRPC with mobile app. We used Google Cloud Platform to host them. For image processing we're using Google Vision API to extract labels from the pictures and decide whether there are any musicians. We also used Google Popular Times and parsed more than 11000 different restaurants, bars, museums and other available objects in Berlin to create a map of most crowded areas and direct musicians there.

What we learned

Gcloud vision API and Popular Times were new things for us and data analysis.

What's next for hearMe

We're planning to add more ways of adding musicians to the map and also working on a cool feature that enables bar owners to find and invite cool artists to their places and attract more visitors.

Built With

• google-cloud
• google-populartimes
• google-vision-api
• here-maps
• kotlin
• python