Hi everyone!

For a final project we wanted to look into the kinds of genres of music, which were coming out of Austin and Texas.  We decided to focus on the kinds of Texas artists who were popular in the United States and talk to artists who were performing in Austin who could describe to us what genre of music they thought could best describe them. We also wanted to know if living in Texas had influenced their music. Here is a link to the project: http://thomhodge.com/final/

A drummer rocking out on stage.
A drummer rocking out on stage.

What we did:

1. We shot photos and video of artists, so readers could get a better feel of some of the city’s music venues. We used i-Movie to edit videos.

2. We used Photoshop to edit pictures and change other pictures to black and white for background.

3. We used Spotify’s API to find the information about popular Texas artists and how they rank within the United States.

4.  Used Google Fusion tables to graph the information.

5. We used Javascript for the slideshow.

6. We used the Knight Lab to embed music we recorded at shows within the text. The sound on top of the text is music from an artist’s show. We thought it would be a cool way to emphasize quotes and important text.

7. To display photos better we made a parallax page.

Some of the problems we ran into is narrowing down what we wanted to look at in the API. Also the parallax page kept breaking whenever we embedded html, photos and the logo, so that took forever to figure out and was the most time consuming part of the project. Sometimes the photos in the background would change size or disappear if we added code.  Also finding a slideshow, which was strictly Javascript and had no html, so we could put on our page took time.

We really liked the pair programming and got a lot done when we were right next to each other. We were able to feed ideas off each other and provide help if one of us were stuck on a piece of code or writing copy.

We hope you like the material.  This was a wonderful semester!!! We learned so much and had a lot of fun. Thank you guys for being so awesome. -Thomas & Zahra

 

 

Many Sounds of Texas