Frank Denbow Wins Our Music Hackweek Contest with SongVoodoo

Frank Denbow Wins Our Music Hackweek Contest with SongVoodoo

Alright, Shazaam is pretty good at what it does, but there’s been a lot of occasions where the background noise is just too much and it can’t pick up the song playing. That’s where Frank Denbow’s app really shines. Just text (917) 934-3979 with any of the lyrics to a song and it’ll respond with the name and artist. Text “#play [song]” and it’ll call you with a preview of the song. Obviously, it trips up a bit with overlapping lyrics, but that’s easily remedied by adding a few more lyrics to the search. For its clean integration with multiple music APIs, SongVoodoo is ource choice for last week’s music hackweek contest.

For winning our Music Hackweek contest, Frank wins $100 in Twilio credit, an Amazon Kindle 3G, and a very sweet Twilio track jacket.

Here’s what Frank had to say about the genesis of SongVoodoo:

– What’s the back story of your submission? When/how/why was it started? How are things going? Future plans?

This was an entry for Music Hackday in NY. I was trying to come up with a Twilio Shazaam app but it wasn’t working with the other API’s I was using. It was 8am and only had a few hours left to come up with something, and then it hit me that search for the text of lyrics might be an even better app. I put together a prototype just in time for the presentations and was happy with the output.

People seem to enjoy it and I hope to improve some of the results. Sometimes there are similar lyrics on a few popular songs so I am unclear on the best way to surface the results I get back. I’d like to think about that and find ways of getting better matches.

This has sparked an interest in understanding the lyrics space on the web, seeing if there are other ways in which I can expand SongVoodoo to serve the lyrics needs of people online.

– What technologies are you using to build/support it?

It was built in PHP with the music clips from 7digital and the lyric search from MusixMatch.

– How was the experience of integrating Twilio with your chosen tools and technologies?

Having worked with Twilio before, integrating the SMS functionality was the easiest part. Working with the new apis took more time but were equally simple to implement.

– How did you get started developing with Twilio?

Seeing John Britton’s sick presentation at NY Tech Meetup got me started.