Inspiration
With this project, we wanted to see how we could visualize some of the vast amounts of ocean data out there in fun and creative ways. We eventually settled on the idea of music, as the ocean has very musical qualities and the similarities between ocean waves and sound waves interested us.
What it does
Our website allows you to click anywhere on a map of the world and listen to music generated procedurally from oceanographic data at that location. It fetches data continuously to stay up to data and moves your location according to ocean currents to keep the music fresh.
How we built it
Technologies:
- HTML, CSS, Typescript: to build the website
- tone.js: to synthesize the music
- Python: to build the web server and fetch the data
- NOAA API: source for most of the data
Challenges we ran into
During this project, we ran into plenty of challenges. Most of them were pretty simple, owing to our collective inexperience with web development, but some of them caused bigger headaches---such as the lack of easily available data about the entire ocean and the many different formats the data came in.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Overall, we are quite proud of the project, especially some of our workarounds to collect data from the internet and our efficient application architecture.
What we learned
The main lesson that we learned during this hackathon was to make sure that all of the resources we needed would be easily available, instead of assuming that we would be able to find them later.
What's next for Ocean Waves
If we were to continue developing this project, we would like to collect data about sea life and use that to add extra layers to the music and make it more interesting and regional.
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