Harmony

Background Music for Everyday Life

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Inspiration

As a child, I loved to play adventure games. Sure, I was fine with shooting games and tower defense, but there was just something so engrossing about a good story. Nowadays, I don't get much time to read books, but I still have the memories of certain games and their stories.

What it does

Upon pressing a button, the app reads your location, determines the type of place you are at (restaurant, school, etc), and plays an associated piece of background music, often from the games I play. The previews in this app represent older games as well as newer ones, just as my childhood was.

How I built it

I used Android Studio to develop basic app functionality and the Google Places API for Android to get rich location data.

Challenges I ran into

  • Working with the Google API was really tough for me. Between Tasks, Buffers, and other strange-looking object names, I was initially very confused. Over time (and lots of documentation reading - my browser history is a mess), I learned what these things meant and built this app.

  • Originally, I was going to build a 'party mode' where the app would analyze conversations around the device to determine the general mood of a place and play corresponding music. I also had plans to use a Watson API to figure out the feelings. Unfortunately, I found out 3 hours into this hackathon that Android Emulators do not support speech recognition. I don't own an android device, so that was the end of the road for the 'party mode' :(

  • The Google API doesn't reliably return names of places, but does reliably return addresses. There is hard code in here for proof of concept.

  • At about 2 AM, Google had the bright idea to make my device appear to be in a remote location in Alabama (which still happens occasionally!). It took me until about 6:30 AM to find a workaround. On the bright side, if that ever happens again, I've added a "middle of nowhere" sound file.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

This is my third Android app to date. Considering how the first two were Hello World apps, I knew next to nothing coming into this hackathon. Given this app, I think I've made quite an improvement. Learning a ton of Android and APIs was exhausting and stressful, but really rewarding, even with small victories.

I also didn't have a team on this one, and I am proud that I could learn all of this independently.

What's next for Harmony

  • Finding a way to make that speech to text work, probably by buying/renting/borrowing a physical android phone.
  • Remove the hard code that negotiates addresses with place names. Someone probably has an API for that.
  • Use a listener to detect location changes so a user doesn't have to press the button each time.
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