Terp Tunes

Inspiration

In a 2023 Gallup poll, 39% of college students reported feeling lonely during a majority of the day. “Feelings of stress, worry, loneliness and sadness have challenged higher education institutions in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and they are likely to continue…” (Gallup 2023). Through this project, we can foster greater connections between UMD students and potentially extend to a wider user base of students in general. Research suggests that “playing music… together may be particularly potent in bringing about social closeness through the release of endorphins” (Berkeley 2016). We hope to alleviate the current problem of student loneliness by utilizing music through our app.

What it does

Using the Spotify API, our app collects user data (top tracks, top artists) and compares it to aggregate data from the entire UMD population stored in a database hosted by MongoDB. Users are able to see their similarity rating and top artists/tracks across campus.

How we built it

The app was built using Javascript, HTML, CSS, and React. We utilized API calls to the Spotify API in order to authenticate and use data from a user's Spotify. The data was stored in a database using Mongodb which was then utilized to calculate the school's top data. These algorithms were created using Javascript and displayed using HTML code.

Challenges we ran into

Security - Using Spotify to authenticate users made it difficult to create and refresh tokens, allowing for security risks when the data is shared

API Limitations - Spotify deprecated many properties from its Web API, which prevented us from implementing many of our original planned features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to successfully connect the database to user data through Mongo DB

Utilizing calls to the Spotify API, the website is able to get a user’s top tracks and artists to calculate the most popular music on campus and get a similarity percentage between the user and the rest of the students

The website is able to redirect to the Spotify authentication page so that users can log in directly with their Spotify account

What we learned

We learned a lot about working with APIs as well as using Mongodb to store our data. We also learned about how to properly plan and execute a realistic project given the short time period we had to complete it. It was also important for us to learn how to integrate the front and the back end together since that was what we struggled most with since we didn't figure that out until towards the end of the project.