Sounds of PTT (Backend)

Sounds of PTT is a web application that can turn an article on PTT into audible frequencies. This is the backend part of the project. For the frontend, please refer https://github.com/TimJJTing/ptt-sounds.

Idea

PTT is the most popular BBS in Taiwan, where one can find the public’s opinion for almost any given topic. With public’s opinion structuralized in a series of short comments and “push/boo” tags, one can read through the discussion thread to catch the public’s sentiment orientations of a topic.

However, reading is not the only way we sense this universe. Just like the inspiring project by NASA, what if we could actually “hear” public's sentiment orientations? Does it feel different from reading? Can we compose meaningful sounds from public's opinions? Will a positive rated article sounds better than a negative rated article? If the author and commenters of an article start a band, how will their music sound like? This web application is designed to answer these questions.

How It Works in General

A User first enters a PTT article URL in the [Frontend]. When the [Backend API] receives a valid PTT article URL, it dispatches a [Crawler], which crawls and re-structuralizes article contents for the [Sound Maker]. The [Sound Maker] then can process structuralized data with 3 steps, tokenization, quantization (based on sentiment polarity of words), and finally sonification. After the procedure is done, a media file will be generated and therefore can be referenced via the [Frontend].

Technology Used

Frontend

• Vue.js
• Vue router
• Bootstrap

Backend

Hosting/Environment

• Google Cloud Compute Engine
• Docker-Compose

Web Server

• Nginx

API

• Django
• Django rest framework
• Celery

Crawler

• Scrapy/Scrapinghub

Sound Maker

Tokenization

• pandas
• jseg/jieba

Quantization

• numpy
• ANTUSD

Sonification

• thinkdsp (with some customized code)

Database

• Postgresql

Messaging/Cache Backend

• Redis

TODOs

High Priority

• [General] Finish the README.md
• [Frontend] Redesign component hierarchy
• [Backend-API] Reduce restart loading time
• [Backend-API] Deal with warning messages

Medium Priority

• [Backend-DB] Migrate from container to Cloud SQL instance
• [Backend-API] Serve backend static and media files with Cloud Storage buckets

Low Priority

• [Backend-Hosting] Migrate from Nginx to Google's load balancer service

Might Be A Good Idea To Do

• [Frontend] An interface that controls ADSR via the ADSR API to change the timbre of sounds
• [Frontend] Timbre customization interfaces
• [Frontend] Real-time Audio-visual feature with p5.js or d3.js

Credits

Inspiration and Acknowledgements

• Sounds of the Sun
• Prof. Feng-Yang Kuo
• Yen-tzu Chang

Resources

• Allen B. Downey: The author of Think DSP, an awesome book for learning digital signal processing.
• NLPSA: Where I acquire ANTUSD for this project.
• Jseg: A better choice for Chinese tokenization in this project.

References

• Dockerizing a Full-stack Application
• nginx配置location总结及rewrite规则写法
• Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO)
• Setup caching in Django With Redis
• Wave Generation in Python