The story is part of the website at https://danceable-lyrics.herokuapp.com/
Also my CockroachDB cluster is called Pretty Vacant after the song, and for a bit of a laugh because at the time I wasn't sure I was going to actually do a project and my database would actually end up Pretty Vacant. (It is not.)
Inspiration
Rock music is danceable. 🎸💃
This is a hill I will die on. But most choreographed (and TikTok-ed?) moves are set to other genres, and Spotify's "danceability" score comes in lower on my rock tracks than my pop and hip-hop tracks.
That made me wonder--why do so many iconic rock songs reference "dance" if the genre really isn't made for doing so? Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Joan Jett ... what were they talking about?
I wanted to prove that rock music was made for dancing.
What it does
Entertains you, hopefully? (Turn the sound on!)
How I built it
BeautifulSoup to scrape Last.fm, LyricsGenius to retrieve song lyrics, CockroachDB and SQL to store song information, HTML/CSS/JS and Chart.js to display the data.
Challenges I ran into
Had a bit of a time trying to deploy the app and transferred it to a Flask server last minute. I think this project ended up being within my comfort zone considering that I was doing other activities during the hackathon and only worked on this project for a few hours; I wanted to be more ambitious with the data visualization and "scrollytelling" but switched from D3 to Chart.js because I felt D3 would be hitting a nail with a sledgehammer.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Submitting a project for the first time in an in-person hackathon
What I learned
That sometimes your predictions are wrong but that can lead to more theories and story ideas...
What's next for If You Want To Dance With Me
-More interactive UI + graphs (and transferring graphs to D3 to create more complex and unique visualizations)
-Different analysis point? I.e. different words (rather than just "dance") to search for; using NLP to detect parts of speech etc.
-Checking how much my own "danceability" score lines up with Spotify's danceability score with the Spotify API
-Refining the story and making it into a data-driven pop culture investigation with a more compelling argument, rather than just a quick experiment
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