Listening with ya

Inspiration

Music is a powerful social tool for bonding and cultural identity. Enjoying music used to be a activity shared as a collective such as listening to the radio, playing a CD or a tape to be heard by everyone around. However, with new technology, music listening has become an increasingly individualist activity with personal accounts and personal earphones that the joy to sharing a moment with others with a song is forgotten. Because of how accessible it is to enjoy music wherever we go and by ourselves, this slowly encourages a culture of people enjoying music in social isolation which goes against the very spirit of music bonding people.

Music also shapes trends and culture. Changes in culture is often difficult to track because it is highly fluid. By being able to see the spatial distribution of users listening to the most trending songs, it allows businesses, governments and academics to track which genre, songs and song artists is most popular over specific demographies over space and time. This is useful in studying the soft influence of different cultures in a global world, recording past music trends and predicting cultural trends in future.

What it does

Listening with You is a web page that connects users to their spotify account. Whatever song that is playing at the moment, the user can see who is listening to the same track as them by seeing other users, presented as datapoints, on a map. The user is able zoom in and out of the map, so that they can see other users listening to the same track as them, perhaps in the same bus, the same neighbourhood or even on the other side of the world. This increases users' awareness that they are part of a bigger collective enjoying the a song and sharing the same experiences together. For instance, someone could be playing a break up song Happier than ever at 3am and they might find that there are others doing the same at the exact hour.

when users zoom in, they can see comments made by other users about the song such as descriptions of what the song means to them and users can react to these comments through emojis and reply with comments too. This allows users to have a more personal interaction to strangers and feel connected over a song, making the joy of music as a community felt.

How we built it

I used Ai studio to help me create the web.

Challenges we ran into

Real data of users and their music consumption and locational data are private and inaccessible for now. I also encountered copyright issues so I cannot play the real songs by real artists. I tried linking the web to spotify but its not easy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The map and datapoints gives an idea of the potentional of seeing other users enjoying music together.

What we learned

I learnt that perhaps more time to scour for data would be helpful.

What's next for Listening with ya

I will try to collect more data and develop this with more developed geographical information system tools like ArcGIS or Esri.

Built With

• googleaistudio
• spotify