What Would Jean Grey Rap?

Yes, this is a serious question - Markov Chains Made Fun

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Inspiration

I was having an existential crisis. To be (humorous), or not to be, that is the question.

What it does

I built a Flask Application that generates rap-like lyrics that draw inspiration from Jean Grey and a song artist of our choosing by scraping their top songs on Genius.com and feeding it into a Markov Model.

How I built it

I call Genius.com’s APIs and scrape lyric text from an artist’s top 3 songs with BeautifulSoup. Afterwards, I built a Markov Chain class in python, populated the chain, and generated lyrics dynamically once artist data is input. I used Flask to tie everything together in a web app.

Challenges I ran into

Styling in flask is a learning curve. I attempted to implement a slider so that users can select a character to meld lyrics with, but I couldn't get it to present itself in the way I wanted it to, so I scaled down the project scope and vision for the front end.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

Making a strong effort to balance being serious about learning while having a sense of humor — this is my first attempt at being funny, seriously.

What I learned

Everyone has a humorous side to them. Whether or not they show it is another story. Existential crisis averted—

What's next for What Would Jean Grey Rap?

Adding auto-generated melody so that we can take this project to the next level - What Would Jean Grey Sing?

A Word of Thanks

While I was aiming to compete in the Most Humorous prize with this hack, I am thankful to have placed 2nd and be selected as a finalist. I'm earnest about learning something new and expanding my skillset at hackathons, even when my goal is to try being funny.

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