For the summer of 2020, I worked on Real Talk Radio under Ekene Ijeoma with the Poetic Justice Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Real Talk Radio is a continuous broadcasting system. It contains spoken word song introductions in Black music from hip hop to jazz as a form of Black thought and knowledge.
Project Overview
Real Talk Radio is a series of software-generated live-streamed sound and video works. It is composed of a never-ending mix of spoken-word intros, outros, interludes, and skits from hip-hop songs alongside shout-outs from Black creatives.
As a vocal portrait and sonic meditation, it explores multi-genre and multigenerational Black thought and expression in the US.
The first edition of Real Talk Radio features the top 100 musicians with the most popular spoken-word song segments. All editions are free and accessible to the public 24/7, both over the phone and online.
This project is a part of the Poetic Justice Group at the MIT Media Lab and is currently in development.
My Contributions
I was a fullstack web developer for Real Talk radio and built the first version of the system.
Since this was a primarily curatorial project, there needed to be a flexible way to browse and edit the snippets to be included in the livestream.
Google Sheets Backend
I used a crafty approach to build the first version. I used Google Sheets as a database, which allowed for easy manipulation and browsing of data.
This approach was free and quick to spin up. The curators were also familiar with using Sheets. However, later on Sheets was difficult to query data from for the frontend livestream. The backend had to be rebuilt after my summer internship.
Song Scraping
To populate the database with songs for curators to select, I wrote a Python script to scrape the web for top songs, segmented by spoken interludes (using lyric scraping).
This script automatically uploaded all the songs to a Google Sheet where the curator could easily manipulate all of the data. This approach jumpstarted the curation process and made it easier for the curator to make decisions about what content to include in the live stream.
Video Demo
Tech Stack
Frontend: React
Backend: Flask
Hosting: Heroku