LONDON THE O T E M WELCO
4–5
8TH
BER SEPTEM
2010
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MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
MUSIC HACK DAY MARKS ITS EIGHTH EVENT WITH A RETURN TO LONDON
Words and pictures compiled by: Dave Haynes (@haynes_dave) SoundCloud & founder of Music Hack Day
It’s September 2010 and Music Hack Day has returned to The Guardian’s lovely offices in London. It seems so long ago that I, along with a few co-conspirators, started hatching plans for the first ever event back in July last year. This is now our eighth event in just over 12 months, having taken in a diverse group of hackers at some wonderful venues in Berlin, Amsterdam, Boston, Stockholm and San Francisco. It’s quite incredible to think how many people have joined us at Music Hack Days across the world, united by a love of music, hacking and making good things happen. In this paper we’ve collated a series of interviews with some of the allstar hackers that have attended several of the events so far. And we’ve been digging through the archive of Flickr photos to give everyone a taster of what went on in all the different cities that have played host.
The idea of Music Hack Day is simple -- 24 hours to build the next generation of music apps. Web, mobile, software, hardware, instruments, art -- anything goes as long as it’s music related. Whilst everyone else is busy talking about the future of music, at Music Hack Day we’re having a lot of fun actually making it. And there’s been no shortage of awesome projects that have been demoed at the end of each and every event. Whether it’s location-based music streaming services, robotic xylophones or t-shirts with song lyrics on them, we’ve certainly had an amazing selection of hacks built. We’ve seen the useful to the useless, the serious to the hilarious, projects that have been launched commercially to those that are instantly forgotten. To help you remember some of the finest we’ve picked our top two or three from each Music Hack Day so far and published them here in our own special app gallery in print form. It’s been amazing to see Music Hack Day grow and develop. And I’ve met, and been helped by, a lot of amazing people along the way. But there is a serious p o i nt underlying all
this music hacking. In the old days it was DJs, A&R folks, labels and record store owners that were the gatekeepers to music. But today we’re seeing a new, important gatekeeper emerge... the hacker. Using new tools and open APIs developers can quickly create new apps that change how people explore, discover, create and interact with music. Music Hack Day celebrates this, accelerates it and tries to push the envelope forward by bringing new digital music companies together with hackers from a number of different disciplines. And has hopefully helped grow a wonderful spirit of collaboration and creativity within this new ecosystem. It’s not surprising that labels such as Universal Music, Domino and PIAS all recognize the importance of engaging with this community and being at an event like Music Hack Day London.
things too. Definitely an area we’re keen to see expand at future events. So keep your diaries free for the next Music Hack Day in Barcelona on 2/3rd October if you’re into the idea of some Autumn hacking in one of the best cities in Europe. And we hope we’ll be back again in Boston and Berlin some time in 2011. Whispers of a NYC event still persist and I’m sure there’s even more to come. Keep following us on Twitter @musichackday and over at blog.musichackday.org for all the latest updates. To leave you with a quote from fellow Music Hack Day organizer Paul Lamere, “someone once said - APIs are the sex organs of software. Data is the DNA. If this is true, then Music Hack Days are orgies.”
But it’s not just about music discovery and consumption, Music Hack Day is increasingly about new forms and tools to advance music creation. And it’s been great to see so much hacking focused on this side o f
Love, Music & APIs Anton Lindqvist: http:// www.flickr.com/photos/ mptre/4319778424/
MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
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MUSIC HACK DAY INTERVIEWS
Henrik Berggren What made you decide to organize a Music Hack Day in Stockholm? After having such a blast in both London and Berlin we decided that Stockholm needed to host a hack too. We have some great companies here. Spotify was interested in joining from the beginning and that was of course interesting. Doberman, the company that lent us the space, was very keen on making it happen as well. And not to forget, my coorganizer Mattias Arrelid & I love hacking!
And your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? One of my personal favorites was Cristiano Betta’s ‘Music Zeitgeist’, so simple and smart.
What’s the recipe for success of a good music hack day? I would say the most important ingredients are the hackers themselves.
What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Keep your project extremely simple, and when you’ve done that, cut off 90% of the features.
What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? Hacking :) I’ve just started a new project around reading, you will all hear about it soon! It’s called Everyread and will take a crack at e-books and reading.
What would you love to see someone build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? A playlist manager that can queue up tracks from any source, web, Spotify, iTunes etc. That would rock!
You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. What was your favorite? London was magical since it was the first one but I think I liked Stockholm the best, it was so cool seeing everyone hacking in my hometown.
You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? 90’s skate punk. What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? Ruby on Rails, jQuery, Heroku, Git, Textmate. If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? Sailing.
THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENTS ARE THE HACKERS THEMSELVES
Robb Böhnke You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. Which were those and what was your favorite? So far I’ve been to Berlin, Stockholm, Amsterdam and San Francisco. My personal favourite being Stockholm. Henrik & Mattias were great hosts, there were some awesome hacks and a Batmobile (really!) is obviously difficult to beat. What made you want to come and take part in Music Hack Day in the first place? It was the challenge of whether I could come up with something in the 24h timeframe that first made me want to come. What have you personally got out of Music Hack Day? I’ve met many awesome people and always had a great time, it’s a very inspiring thing and I’m really glad to have been a part of that. What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I’m studying Computer Science at Freie Universität Berlin and currently interning at SoundCloud as part of their API team. What’s your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? I’m always looking forward to what Matt Ogle from Last.fm comes up with, but if I have to pick just one, I’d say the ProximRadio + Blobble combo that Jonty Wareing and Michael Coffey did. Tracking the musical taste of everyone in a room using Bluetooth IDs is just very clever.
What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Document well! Make sure to set up a good explanation of what you built and take some nice photos for the generations of music hackers to come. At the Berlin event you built an Arduino-powered xylophone robot thingumy? What inspired you to do that (and do you have a better description)?! Haha, I’m afraid thingumy fits very well. When I met Ramsey at the event we decided that we wanted to build something related to music creation rather than consumption. I think we settled for the glockenspiel because it’s comparatively easy to set up – and of course cheap. How important is hardware hacking at an event like Music Hack Day? The majority of the projects are software, but I hope hardware’s presence grows over the next few Music Hack Day events. There are a lot of crazy ideas to be glued together. You’re busy gluing and soldering, making another thingumy, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? For these things, I prefer Medeski, Martin & Wood ‘End of the World Party’. If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? Tough question, If you ever host a 24 hours LEGO marathon, count me in.
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MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
I HAVE TO ADMIT I’M NOW COMPLETELY HOOKED
Matt Ogle What’s your proper job, when you’re not busy hacking? I’ve spent the last five years at Last.fm, where I’m currently Head of Web Product. As such, I look after many aspects of the website, API, and overall Last. fm feature set.
Thomas Bonte You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now. Which was your favorite? The San Francisco edition was a blast, meeting up with the hackers of the infamous Silicon Valley companies. We combined MHD with SFMusicTech, SFNewtech and a visit at Twitter, Facebook and Stanford University. That was a week I shall not forget.
Daniel Raffel What made you decide to step up and help organize a Music Hack Day in San Francisco? Music and technology are two longtime passions of mine. I also enjoy helping to provide creative people with a platform and excuse to do their thing. That’s why I started the record labels Lucky Kitchen and Apartment B too. What’s been the best thing about having organized a Music Hack Day event? Knowing that you helped encourage creative people to meet, collaborate and bring something new into the world. How is the scene out in San Francisco for all things music, tech and hacking? The music tech scene in SF is very healthy. There is an enormous number of people with technical chops and creative ideas. When we put out word about this event we filled up our venue with a great group of folks in just a matter of hours. And what’s the recipe for success of a good Music Hack Day? Perseverance + collaboration + flexibility + creativity + humor + hard work + proper caffeination. What’s your proper job when you’re not busy organizing hack days? I was Senior Product Manager at Yahoo! but recently left to become founder of an early stage, stealth startup. Learn more @HeavyBits. Favorite Music Hack Day project so far? The Artikulator by Luke Iannini and Mike Rotondo.
What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Try to stay relaxed, have fun, and no matter what the state of your project is at the end of the hackathon - demo it! What do you think people get out of attending a Music Hack Day weekend? Satisfaction from being a maker. Pleasure from meeting people with common interests. Enjoyment from learning about new tools and services. You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? The album ‘Quique’ by Seefeel If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? Camping and hiking in Patagonia with my wife.
And what’s been your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? From the top of my mind: Sequencer_5, Jook, Charting and The Swinger. What made you want to come and take part in Music Hack Day in the first place? Mainly curiosity. I had no clue what it was about. I have to admit I’m now completely hooked. What have you personally got out of Music Hack Day? Being able to directly speak with the guys who are running the hottest and latest music startups is enormously helpful whilst trying to setup my own business. And of course the aspect of learning so many new things in just 24 hours. There is just no other equal event on this planet. What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? My main activity now is putting MuseScore.com on the rails. I do this together with Nicolas Froment & Werner Schweer and we hope this will become the SoundCloud of sheet music ;-)
What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Check out the API documentation in advance and prepare some ideas. Make sure you follow the #musichackday tag on twitter and fire away your own ideas. Finding people to team up with in advance will gain you a few hours during the event. What would you love to see someone build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? I would love to see digital instruments such as digital pianos be able to connect with API’s. What if you could send your recording straight to SoundCloud? Or more related to my business, retrieve sheet music (MusicXML) from the MuseScore.com API and let the piano teach you how to play it. I would love to brainstorm about that with the Yamaha people. What is the best thing about Music Hack Day and what more would you like to see? As said by Stewart Brand, “The true nature of any new technology can be learned best from what enthusiasts do with it.” I believe this is completely applicable to Music Hack Day. One thing I would like to see more, is more Belgians coming to the MHD events. I’m looking for the critical mass to bring Music Hack Day to Brussels one day. You’re busy hacking away, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? Film music. I was a big fan of Streamingsoundtracks.com but Spotify replaced it completely.
But you presented The Echo Nest API at one of the events. Would you say there is a spirit of collaboration at Music Hack Day? There certainly is! The online music space is still a cozy size, and Music Hack Day in particular has helped the community get to know each other better. There’s friendly competition of course, but I think the fact that everyone is there because they love the same thing -- music -- makes a big difference. You can see this in the number of hackers who meet at the events and end up spontaneously building something together. How many Music Hack Days have you been to now, it’s quite a few right? I’ve only missed the Berlin one, so this latest London day will make it... seven? Oh dear. And which was your favorite event? They’ve all been top-notch but if I had to pick one I’d probably say Stockholm. I’ve never seen so many hackers stay at the venue overnight and the quality of the demos was impressive. Also, the beer fridge was made of snow (warming my Canadian heart) and the Batmobile turned up. I mean, really. And your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? I know it’s made a lot of lists already, but I have to go with “The Swinger” by Tristan from The Echo Nest. It’s that rare hack: small, spontaneous, and delivers exactly what it promises -- incredibly listenable swing renditions of any tune you feed it. Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around what an API can do but The Swinger brings one to life.
MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
Sabrina Leandro
Paul Lamere
What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I’m a back-end developer at Songkick. Lately I’ve been working on improving our API for partners and other developers.
What’s your proper job when you’re not busy hacking? I work at a company called the Echo Nest which is a music intelligence company located near Boston MA. I spend my day thinking about what we can do to make it easier for developers to create the next generation music apps. A lucky thing for me is I get to hack as part of my day job.
You’ve taken part in several Music Hack Days on behalf of Songkick now. Which has been your favorite? All of them have been lots of fun. But if I had to pick... I’d say the Stockholm one, for exposing me (a Brazilian!) to extreme weather, and still making the event feel welcoming and cosy. And for having a Batmobile.
What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Don’t skip the workshops — a lot of them conclude with tasty hints on brand new (or even unreleased) API’s that can be interesting to hang a hack on. Also, don’t be afraid to meet people and solicit collaborators. You don’t have to go it alone! What would you love to see someone build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? I’m excited by the trend of more hardware and music creation hacks. More of that would be great. I’m also interested in hacks that help me learn more about the music I already love, which is an often-neglected component of music discovery. What are your criteria when deciding what to hack on at the next Music Hack Day? Don’t overthink it! Just start working on your first impulse and let the 24-hour time limit inspire you to be ruthless. Carve it down to the bare essentials and get your idea out. You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? Hehe, I made a whole website to answer that question! (http://www.last.fm/ user/flaneur) Lately, though, it’s been 70s soft rock (no idea), Canadian folk, and some chillwave. If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? Watching a space shuttle launch — there are only a couple left, ever. Next one’s in November, care to join?
What do you think Songkick has got out of participating in an event like Music Hack Day? We get lots of feedback about our API during Music Hack Day. It’s really interesting to see others using it, to understand where it hurts, where it works. We have hacked on our API during the events, from requests made by other developers, building new features on the weekend that later get included for everyone. What has been your favorite Music Hack Day project so far? There are so many... I really like 6 Degrees of Black Sabbath. Not only does it show how much interesting data is available out there, but it’s also super fun. What would you love to see someone build at an upcoming Music Hack Day? On Songkick, users can say which events they attended. We call it their “gigography”. I’m such a big data nerd and I fill in mine religiously. So I’d love to see a cool visualization of that data, the venues I’ve been to the most, the artists and genres I like, how my taste for live music has changed through the years...
What are your top tips for a company attending or putting on a workshop at a Music Hack Day for the first time? Come prepared and open to discuss your product and API with developers. It’s such an nice opportunity to get direct feedback. What ingredients do you think make up a successful Music Hack Day? Interested hackers, coffee and powerful wi-fi. You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? The same kind of music I listen anytime: sweet and catchy indiepop. What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? To get something finished in 24 hours, I try to use tools I’m already familiar with and dynamic languages like Ruby or Python. If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? I don’t think I’d be able to focus on one thing for 24 hours by myself!
You’ve played an essential role in spreading Music Hack Day to so many different cities? What do you think is the key to its success? The key to Music Hack Day success comes from its ability to attract individuals who are extremely passionate about music and technology. When put into the same space for a weekend, really exciting things tend to happen. And what’s been the best thing about having organized a Music Hack Day event? It is great to meet so many creative people who are really excited to spend their weekend hacking. I remember at the end of the Music Hack Day Boston event, two student developers won Rock Band prizes for their hacks - they were so revved up about the experience. It was great to be a part of that. Boston was one of the largest Music Hack Days so far. What do you think made that event so popular? Music Hack Day Boston was the first Music Hack Day held in the North America. After seeing all of the fun people were having at the Music Hack Days in London, Berlin and Amsterdam, when we finally had one on this side of the world, there were a lot of people ready to go. You’ve been to a few Music Hack Days now, what was your favorite? I have a feeling that my favorite Music Hack Day will be the one held next month in London. At previous Music Hack Days where I was an organizer, I spent too much time worrying about event details (would the food arrive on time, would the wireless work) to really enjoy the event. But in London, I’ll just be able to participate without all of the worry. I’m really looking forward to it.
LET THE 24-HOUR TIME LIMIT INSPIRE YOU TO BE RUTHLESS
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And your favorite music hack day project so far? My (probably biased) favorite project so far has been Tristan’s Swinger. Tristan wrote a little bit of code that will make any song swing. It’s a lot of fun. My favorite non-Echo Nest project is Matt Ogle’s ‘Bragging Rights’. It uses the Last.fm API to let you settle the argument, “Who listened to that band first?”. The really neat thing about it is that Matt wrote it in about 3 hours. What are your top tips for anyone attending a Music Hack Day for the first time? Reach out to others at the Music Hack Day. Look for someone who may share the same ideas that you have but has different skills. Work as a team with someone you don’t know. And most importantly, finish something. What digital music companies should we be keeping an eye on? The ones to keep an eye on are the individual hackers who are not beholden to any VCs or a Board of Directors. Today’s hacker will be tomorrow’s successful digital music company. You’re behind your laptop, busy hacking, earphones plugged in. What are you listening to? Oh, that varies - but I’m most productive when listening to very high tempo, energetic electronic music - lately I’ve been listening to Venetian Snares when coding. What are your weapons of choice when starting out on a new hack? Some tools in my toolbox: My MacBook pro, Python or Java, Music APIs (Echo Nest, Musicbrainz, Last.fm, etc.), graph libraries (networkx, prefuse), 3D libraries (jme) If you could spend 24 hours doing something completely different, what would it most likely be? I’m a frustrated musician, I’d probably spend time playing with music generation software like CSound or chuck to try to make some music.
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MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
Opposite page
This page
Top left:Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss settling in for an overnight SoundCloud hack session. Henrik Berggren: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ hinkeb/3717748640/
Top left: Headphones on, busy hacking. David Kjelkerud: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ davidkjelkerud/4321322483/
Bottom left: Yes the Batmobile really did show up at Music Hack Day Stockholm. Gernot Poetsch: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ gernot/4316877542/ Top right: Hardware workshop at Music Hack Day Boston. Holly Hasbritt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ habber/4129977458/ Centre right: Music Hack Days love stickers. Henrik Berggren: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ hinkeb/3717752990/ Bottom right: This was no ordinary guitar. Holly Habstritt: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ habber/4582493578/
Top right: Workshops galore at the first Music Hack Day in London. Matt Ogle: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ flaneurdeluxe/3716952352/ Bottom left: The staple diet of a music hacker. Pizza... and lots of it. Michael Schieben: http://www.flickr.com/ photos/mschieben/4548221731/ Centre right: Music Hack Day Stockholm. Paula Martilla: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ paulamarttila/4316536472/ Bottom right: Spotify releasing libspotify for Mac & Windows. Rasmus Andersson: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ rsms/4555695317/
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MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
THE BEST HACKS FROM MUSIC HACK DAY AROUND THE WORLD HACKS FROM LONDON 2009
HACKS FROM BERLIN 2009
Citysounds.fm By: David Kjelkerud (@davidkjelkerud), Henrik Berggren (@henrikberggren)
Music Zeitgeist By: Cristiano Betta (@cbetta) Info: http://bit.ly/musiczeitgeist Site: http://zeitgeist.cristianobetta.com/ Tools: Everyhit.com (built API), LyricsWiki API, Wordle.net Cristiano was wondering if it was possible to visualize the cultural shifts from decade to decade in another way than through the top charts. So what better than a Wordle word-cloud visualization of the music lyrics for the last 6 decades. Out of necessity he actually built his own API on top of EveryHit. com and ran this against the LyricsWiki API. The result is a really interesting insight into the moods of each decade. Turns out there was a lot of ‘love’, ‘yeah’ and ‘hold’-ing in the 60’s. Sounds fantastic!
Xylobot By: Ramsey Arnaoot, Robert Böhnke (@ceterum_censeo)
Info: http://bit.ly/citysoundsfm Site: http://citysounds.fm Tools: SoundCloud API, Flickr API, Ruby on Rails, jQuery Lonely Harps By: Jamie Hollingworth (@jhollingworth) and David Padbury (@davidpadbury) Info: http://bit.ly/lonelyharps Tools: Last.fm to find and match the hotties, Gigulate to get those tickets for the perfect first date, 7Digital to buy tracks for your soundtracks. Ask yourself, what’s important in a serious relationship? Commitment? Mutual Respect? Finding your partner vaguely attractive when not drunk? Jamie and David actually had no idea but admitted to both being comically unsuccessful with women. But they figured that although the above are likely a factor, being able to relate to each other around common tastes in music is definitely much more important. Probably. So you’ve guessed it, this is a dating application based around music which helps you find, setup the ideal first date and create soundtracks for those long awkward silences when you’ve run out of things to say. The site had a sibling-related bug, which added to the pure genius and comedy of Lonely Harps.
It could be said that cities have distinct sounds, from the techno of Berlin to the tropical rhythms of Tunapuna in Trinidad. Citysounds.fm embraces that concept by letting you listen to the sound of your favorite city -- taking the latest music from SoundCloud, identifying its location and then displaying the most popular cities and their tracks. The site also finds corresponding images from each city via tags on Flickr. The site is one of the slickest we’ve seen so far at Music Hack Day and the team even went on to build an iPhone app at the following Music Hack Day in Berlin.
Info: http://bit.ly/xylobot Site: http://vimeo.com/6668819 Source: http://beer2peer.com/hackday/xylobot_software.zip Tools: 1 Arduino microcontroller, 6 Servos, 1 Xylophone, Hot glue, Wood TracksOnAMap By: Johan Uhle (@freenerd) Info: http://bit.ly/tracksonamap Site: http://tracksonamap.com Source: http://github.com/freenerd/ SoundCloud-Map/ Tools: SoundCloud, Google Maps, Google App Engine The ingeniously named TracksOnAMap does exactly what it says on the tin. It takes the latest tracks from SoundCloud, works out their location and then displays them on Google Maps in a rather slick looking way. Tracks can then be tweeted or shared to Facebook and there’s a navigation bar at the bottom which allows you to filter by genre. So if you want to check out where the hottest dubstep scenes are in the world then this is the perfect way to see (and hear) them. The project was forked a year later to create Twestival-fm.com, a charity project that asked musicians around the world to donate tracks and raise money for Concern Worldwide.
Physical hacks have played an important role at Music Hack Day and this has been one of the finest. The Xylobot is an Arduinocontrolled xylophone, capable of handling midi-input. The guys hooked 6 servo-motors up to an Arduino running custom firmware and a java application handling the incoming midi data, sending serial commands to the board. Some sympathy has to go to whoever sat next to the team for 24 hours while the guys finetuned it :)
MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
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HACKS FROM STOCKHOLM 2010
HACKS FROM AMSTERDAM 2010
HACKS FROM BOSTON 2009 Bowie S-S-S-Similarities By: Mike Mandel Info: http://bit.ly/bowiesimilarities Site: http://mr-pc.org/bowie/ Tools: Python, Numpy/Scipy, Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging API Ever wanted to know what the most Bowie-esque sounding moments of Bowie’s music career were. Or the least? Mike used the Musically Intelligent Machines autotagging api to analyze and tag all of David Bowie’s music. Then lined it up in order and calculated the similarity between every 10-second clip and every other 10-second clip in terms of the automatically generated descriptions. Next step was to make some pretty pictures of the resulting similarity matrix. You can then listen to the clips in question by clicking on the matrix and you can zoom in and out and recenter the view. Perhaps not the most practical hack ever made, but it certainly impressed.
Songshirts By: Matt Ogle (@flaneur), Floris Dekker (@floriz), Tim Bormans (@por) Info: http://bit.ly/song-shirts Site: http://users.last.fm/~matt/songshirts Tools: Last.fm API, Zazzle
HacKey By: Matt Ogle (@flaneur) Info: http://bit.ly/hackey Site: http://users.last.fm/~matt/ hackey/ Tools: Last.fm API, The Echo Nest Search API. What’s in a key? Are you a major or a minor person? Are there keys that define your music taste or are there no patterns at all? All-star Last.fm hacker Matt Ogle was mildy curious about these questions and decided to answer them once and for all. So on a cold winter’s weekend in Stockholm he built HacKey, a web app that uses your Last.fm username to retrieve your top tracks and run them against The Echo Nest’s search API to analyse their musical key and show you your own distribution. As Matt states, his project also nicely fits the criteria for his many Music Hack Day projects.... namely being utterly useless and involving colourful pie charts.
Songkick On Tour By: Matt Biddulph (@mattb) Proxim Radio By: Jonty Wareing (@jonty), Michael Coffey (@eartle) Info: http://bit.ly/proximradio Source: http://github.com/Jonty/ Proxim.fm Tools: Python, Last.fm client, Lightblue, bluetooth You walk into a bar, there’s music blasting over the speakers, but it’s not exactly to everybody’s tastes. If only there was a way the jukebox could work out everybody’s music tastes and play back the music that everybody likes. Well, in theory, now there is. Proxim Radio is an app that scans for bluetooth devices that have Last.fm usernames as the device name, then makes the Last. fm client play back music at the intersection of all their libraries. Now if only this actually happened in real life!
Info: http://bit.ly/songkicktour Site: http://www.vimeo.com/9103599 Tools: Songkick, Dopplr, JRuby, Sinatra, Google AppEngine You’re planning several trips, visiting new cities and want to check out some gigs while you’re there. But how are you going to know what’s on that you’ll like? And where to buy tickets? Songkick On Tour connects to your Dopplr account, retrieves your travel itinerary and then checks Songkick for the cities you’ll be in. Nice and simple, but you’ll never miss a great gig while you’re travelling again!
Band t-shirts are pretty popular right? But what about some new clobber based on the lyrics to your favourite songs? Songshirts takes your Last.fm username and then builds your own personal t-shirt store. The results can actually be quite amusing. Much laughter could be heard from the old sofa in Amsterdam on which Matt, Floris and Tim cooked this little project up. But there’s always at least one t-shirt you could be tempted to buy. And should that be the case you can simply click through to Zazzle and make an order.
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MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
HACKS FROM SAN FRANCISCO 2010 The Swinger By: Tristan Jehan Info: http://bit.ly/the-swinger Site: http://soundcloud.com/teejay/ every-breath-you-take-swing-version Source: http://code.google.com/p/ echo-nest-remix/source/browse/trunk/ examples/swinger/swinger.py Tools: The Echo Nest Python Remix SDK including, pydirac, action.py, cloud.py. SoundCloud for audio hosting.
HACKS FROM AMSTERDAM 2010 Sound-Score Cloud By: Thomas Bonte (@thomasbonte) Info: http://bit.ly/soundscorecloud Site: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=eodrg9OIgg0 Tools: Musescore, SoundCloud API This clever hack allows you to play a SoundCloud widget in sync with MuseScore sheet music. This means it’s possible for artists to sync their audio recordings stored on SoundCloud.com with their sheet music stored on MuseScore.com. Obviously, the audio recording can be a performance but why not a tutorial of the artist explaining how to play the song step by step. Or think of a background track so you can play along with your instrument, following the sheet music as a guide. Oh, and with that being said, no more page turning since that will be done for you!
iSticks (with iSteelPan and iTaiko) By: David Ayman Shamma Info: http://bit.ly/isticks Site: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/ isteelpan/id373584341?mt=8 Source: http://www.instructables. com/id/iStick-How-to-make-adrumstick-for-an-iPad/ Tools: Conductive fabric, iPhone SDK, sticks
Six Degrees Of Black Sabbath By: Paul Lamere (@plamere) Info: http://bit.ly/ sixdegreesofblacksabbath Site: http://labs.echonest.com/SixDegrees Tools: MusicBrainz, The Echo Nest, Play.me APIs Ever played the game ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’? Well this is the music geek equivalent. Six Degrees of Black Sabbath finds connections between artists. Any kind of connections are considered - collaborations, aliases, personal relationships and so on. And just like Google maps, if you don’t like a route (let’s say it goes through Yoko Ono) you can easily re-route around her. This hack uses data from MusicBrainz, as well as the Echo Nest and the Play.me APIs. Oh, and it’s rather fun.
Multi-touch is a wonderful thing. But sometimes, the act of making music is done with a tool, like a drumstick or a stylus. It turns out, it’s easy to make a set of drumsticks for a modern capacitive device (like an iPad). At Music Hack Day San Francisco, Ayman Shamma not only made a steel pan drum and a taiko app for his iPad, but he also made some conductive fabric mallets with which to drum. Awesome.
The swinger puts the swing back into your music. Tristan Jehan created a command line python script (about one line of code per hacking hour) which takes two arguments (i.e. a song and a swing factor) and alters (i.e. time-stretches) every beat, one at a time, to give it a swing feel. It works by stretching and compressing every half beat to complementary durations, pulling and pushing the audio, while retaining the original tempo. The effect is controlled by the swing factor parameter (a value between -1 and 1) representing the percent of deviation from original (0 being no variation). With negative values, swingy songs can also be turned to square binary rhythms. So you could say, it swings both ways.
Artikulator By: Luke Ianinni, Mike Rotondo Info: http://bit.ly/artikulator Site: http://mashable. com/2010/05/18/music-ipad/ Tools: SuperCollider, iPhone SDK Luke Ianinni and Mike Rotondo hadn’t met before Music Hack Day. But whilst comparing notes at the San Francisco event they realized that they’d both sketched out the same idea. Artikulator is a universally approachable, multiplayer finger-painting synthesizer and composition tool inspired by the graphical compositions of György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgar Varèse. Draw some lines and listen as your iPad/iPhone/iTouch plays back your musical creation. Wonderful.
MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON. 4–5 SEPTEMBER 2010
O2 LITMUS OPENS UP TOOLS AND NETWORK APIS FOR DEVELOPERS O2 Litmus have been hugely supportive in making this year’s Music Hack Day London take place. For those who might not already know O2 Litmus is O2’s community project dedicated to finding and nurturing the very best new mobile, wireless and internet-enabled applications and services. What this means for you as developers is access to a plethora of tools to create modern, cutting-edge applications: network APIs, handset toolkits and resources and even free advice on marketing and legal issues.
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UK AUTUMN SCHOOL: SOFTWARE CARPENTRY FOR AUDIO AND MUSIC RESEARCHERS SoundSoftware.ac.uk are announcing their UK Autumn School, Software Carpentry for Audio and Music Researchers, which will take place in London on 1-5 November 2010. The school is to train UK-based PhD students and researchers in the software development skills required to build reliable research software quickly and with a minimum of effort, and so maximize the impact of their research.
an efficient, systematic way. Instead, they have to learn for themselves how to build, validate, maintain, and share complex programs, which can lead to big problems later, when others try to build on their research. For more information about the Autumn School and the nomination process visit: www.soundsoftware.ac.uk/ autumnschool-2010-cfn
Software development is a fundamental part of much audio and music research, yet PhD students and young researchers are typically not taught how to build the software they need for their research in
C4DM LEND SUPPORT TO MUSIC HACK DAY Interestingly, Litmus can help developers make money from their applications via a unique revenue model –that gives them access to millions of customers right across Telefonica O2’s international networks. For O2 customers, Litmus gives them the chance to get their hands on the best new mobile applications first, long before their friends or family have access to them. At Litmus, they have real influence in the community, helping to decide which applications and ideas sink and which of them swim, thanks to community tools that let customers talk directly to developers, review and rate their applications and suggest new features. Find out more at www.o2litmus.co.uk
The Centre for Digital Music (C4DM) is a world-leading multidisciplinary research group in the field of Music & Audio Technology. Since its founding members joined Queen Mary University in 2001, the Centre has grown to become arguably the UK’s leading Digital Music research group, with work covering the Music Ontology and using the Semantic Web for Music. Its algorithms and data sets are regularly released under Open Source and Creative Commons licences.
ideally placed to work with industry leaders in forging new business models for the music industry. With many students, including Rebecca Stewart, attending the very first Music Hack Day in London its very fitting that C4DM is now lending its support to this latest event. Find out more at www.elec. qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic and www.isophonics.net for the latest research.
With its broad range of skills and a strong focus on making innovation usable, C4DM is
DEVELOPER ECONOMICS 2010: ‘THE DEVELOPER’S DILEMMA’ Earlier this year, Telefónica Developer Communities in partnership with VisionMobile launched ‘Developer Economics 2010’, a global research project delving into all aspects of mobile application development. The full report, available at www. developereconomics.com, surveyed 400+ international developers, across all major mobile platforms and features 35 data points spanning the entire application development process. The report represented one of the largest mobile developer surveys to date. Participants came from 53 countries and 290 companies. More than 40% of respondents have at least 5 years experience in developing apps, while 78% have
been developing apps for more than 12 months. James Parton, Head of Developer Marketing at Telefonica, explains why the research was commissioned: “For a long time we have felt the industry has been lacking research that credibly tackled the key issues facing developers. ‘Developer Economics 2010 and Beyond’ was an ambitious project. I am confident that due to the quality of the participants, this research has uncovered many of the key issues in application development today.” The research provides insights into all the steps of mobile app
development, from application planning, code development and debugging, to support, goto-market channels, promotion, revenue generation, as well as covering hot topics such as the role of open source and network operators. What was clear from the survey was the growing power of Android in mobile software and content, which may in part be due to the fact that mastering Symbian takes 15 months, compared with less than six months for Android. Parton has encouraged developers to give their own feedback on the report: “This report breaks new ground, and as such I feel it opens as many questions as it answers. I
would encourage you to feedback your opinions on the findings at www.developereconomics.com. If you are a mobile developer
and would like to be involved in next year’s report, please contact VisionMobile at hello@ visionmobile.com.”
THANKS FROM MUSIC HACK DAY LONDON Music Hack Day is run entirely by volunteers and simply wouldn’t happen without the amazing contributions of so many people. We’re bound to miss a few names but here’s some we’d like to thank: Martyn Davies, Jonty Wareing, Phil Cowans, Sabrina Leandro, James Darling, John Martin, Nicky Thompson for steering Music Hack Day London in the right direction.
Rebecca Stewart, Mark Sandler, Mark Plumbley @ Queen Mary University of London. Neil Cocker @ Dizzyjam for the t-shirts. Kamiel, Edial and YourNeighbours.de for the video. Elayne Checketts, Paul Golding, James Parton, Ben Matthews @ O2 Litmus for being such great supporters of Music Hack Day in London and all
our other wonderful sponsors. Alex Hazell and the amazing team at The Guardian who really know how to put on a Music Hack Day. Paul Lamere, David Noel, Henrik Berggren, Mattias Arrelid, Daniel Raffel, Vincent Lindeboom, Tim Heineke, Jon Pierce, Elissa Barrett for having the courage to make Music Hack Day happen in so many wonderful places.
Everyone from all the companies that have participated (too many to name!), everyone who’s written, blogged or tweeted about what we’re doing and most importantly... everyone who’s shown up at a Music Hack Day and finished a hack (or just hung around to enjoy the free pizza!). Special thanks to Alex Parrott for designing this paper. More info at www.alexparrott.co.uk
Info Email: musichackday@gmail.com Web: musichackday.org Blog: blog.musichackday.org Wiki: wiki.musichackday.org Twitter: @musichackday Please add the #musichackday hashtag to any photos, tweets, video