Cat-Astrophic

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from the viral Billie Eilish "What was I made for?" meme, where her vocals are humorously replaced with cat "meows." We wanted to build something fun, silly, and lighthearted that stands out from typical hackathon projects, while sharing our love for this meme with others.

What it does

It takes the vocals from any song and converts them into realistic cat meows, preserving the original melody and rhythm. Basically, it lets you create a "meow" version of any song

How we built it

We isolated vocals using Spleeter and Librosa, then harnessed Sox and Audacity to pitch-correct and autotune cat meows, seamlessly blending them back into the original track. The app itself runs on Databricks with a user-friendly Streamlit interface.

Challenges we ran into

Clean vocal isolation: Achieving pristine separation between vocals and instrumentals proved tricky
Meow mapping: Mapping short meow recordings to individual words or syllables in a song was a tedious and time-consuming process.
Melodic meows: Programmatically giving those meows the right pitch and timing to match the song's melody was a major hurdle. Pre-trained models and tools fell short, leading us to explore audio editing techniques.
Audacity automation: We had to master Audacity scripting and Python to automate the process, as Audacity primarily relies on a GUI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

N/A

What we learned

⁠Technical skills: We deepened our understanding of audio processing, vocal isolation techniques, and the intricacies of Audacity scripting. We also gained valuable experience working with cloud platforms like Databricks and building user interfaces with Streamlit.
⁠ ⁠Collaboration: This project reinforced the importance of teamwork, clear communication, and leveraging each other's strengths to overcome challenges.
⁠Creative problem-solving: When pre-existing tools failed, we had to get creative and combine different techniques to achieve our desired outcome.
⁠The power of memes: We experienced firsthand how memes can inspire creativity and bring people together.

This hackathon was a reminder that sometimes the most rewarding projects are the ones that embrace the absurd and allow us to learn, laugh, and create something truly unique. 😹✨