Synesthesia

Merging the sense of taste and hearing has been well-observed for many years now. For our app, we help people maximize their enjoyment of meals by providing them food OR song recommendations!

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Inspiration

We knew that all our senses were all intertwined and worked together to build the human experience, and wanted to help bring new ways for people to enjoy things. The Pixar Movie _ Ratatouille _, plays with the combined experience of flavor and sound with how Remy the rat visualizes and experiments with food. With that in mind and our eyes set on a fresh, but crazy, idea, we did some research on how well established the tie with those senses were. We were excited to find that there was a lot of scientific research on the relationship of hearing and tasting, as well as the API to support our ideas. Our vision was set

What it does

Synesthesia has two main functions.

First, it can give a user a list of song recommendations to go with a given meal they have with them. This works for anything; breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, even dessert! Song recommendations are based off of scientific research to maximize the enjoyment experience of the meal.

Second, users can also receive meal recommendations that would pair well with some of their favorite songs on Spotify. The large variety of meal recommendations are selected from the Panera menu.

How we built it

Starting with learning about how robust and powerful the Spotify API was, we began by planning how we would integrate the API Requests and authentication with a React website. While everyone collaborated, we initially split into two teams, frontend team handling mockups, styling, displays, and connection; and the backend team handling authentication, API requests, and logic.

Challenges we ran into

Working with React and making authenticated API calls were both their own challenges, but putting those two together on such a tight time restraint was tough. Our team has had experience with React and other API usage, but we found that Spotify had unique authentication methods that were a learning process for us. Making API calls were also difficult as we needed to understand how they were outputted very well in order to run them through a decision making tree. Additionally, the app design used elements of React that none of us have worked with before. We wanted the final product to look polished, even if it took a little longer to implement.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how polished our final product looks. The website is sleek. Also, we're proud of how we were able to handle authentication for our product over many different features and a variety of API call usage.

What we learned

Everyone on the team got their experience with JavaScript and react boosted, along with authentication for a web app. We dealt with issues in CSS and HTML as well. One of our favorite things that we learned was being able to work with API requests (especially Spotify! Their API allows for so many things to be done; from retrieving song names and making playlists to even taking detailed musical analyses of the songs themselves!

What's next for Synesthesia

Our first goal would be to reprep and reformat some of the code to be cleaner and able to be hosted long-term. The CSS needs to be fixed at some parts, and the Reacts forms are still a bit buggy. Just like other apps such as Reciptify and JudgeMySpotify , we want an app that can last online as a fun tool to visit with friends .

We also want to add even more features, like more meal recommendations, and being able to give both song and food recommendations to increasingly accurate degrees.

Thanks for reading! Check out our code here on Github

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