Archive for category events
Rethink Music Hackers’ Weekend
This weekend was Rethink Music Hacker’s Weekend where 100 or so music hackers gathered at the Microsoft NERD to not just rethink music, but to rebuild it. There were about two dozen hacks built, showing a wide range of creativity. Some of my favorites are:
Kinect Bomba -As in the latin style of music called “Bomba”, the dancer is in control of the band and music. The virtual band is the kinect — the dancer(s) can create sweet, live beat-locked music over any mp3 (using echonest-remix), remixes, and even control a virtual looper pedal.
Hiptapes - HipTapes is a music marketing APP enables artists to create custom QR codes and push dynamic content to fans via posters, flyers, CDs, etc. HipTapes mobile app scans the QR code & enables users to instantly stream, bookmark or buy music tracks, purchase concerts tickets, discounted merchandise or leave a message on artist’s Facebook page.
Hipsterer – Figures out how hipster you are? (I knew about this site before it was cool).
Jam Page - Hi-resolution listener analytics for artists.
Texture Learning - A simple genetic algorithm learns the short-time fourier transform of a target static texture. The approximation gradually acquires information about the target sound via repeated semi-random modifications to the spectrogram. Phase and magnitude are learned separately. The learning process is sonified and visualized such that the gradual evolution of the sound from silence to target can be seen and heard. Experimentation with several control parameters results in varied output.
Byrds and the Bee Gees – finds the playlist that your parents could of have used on the night you were conceived. Totally fun app. Toughest part is trying to decide if my dad was ‘smooth back then’.
Lyrical Sonnet Awesome – My favorite hack. Totally origina. Uses lyricfind.com’s API to make a sonnet generator! In Iambic pentameter! The sonnets are in the rhyme scheme of Shakespeare. ABABCDCDEFEFGG, and you can choose key words to populate the themes. Here’s an example:
- Too long values we let them blend and fade
- And with the awesome power they struck
- You’re like a long, cool glass of lemonade
- It’s Knoc-turn’al with a capital K
- Something cool, set one up for me
- If you turn away, oh, honey, please stay
- The center of attention, cool Moe Dee
- I want to take you cool places tonight
- Are you still mad I kicked you out of bed?
- What befalls us in the heat of the night?
- I keep a cool head, I keep a cool head
- That I was mad if they were sane, you see
- The blues my naughty sweetie gives to me.
Map of Music styles - this is my hack – an interactive map of 1000s of music styles, allowing you to explore through the world of music.
See the full list of hacks on hacker league. It was a really fun weekend, with lots of very creative hacking!
Map of Music Styles
Posted by Paul in code, data, events, fun, tags, The Echo Nest, visualization on April 22, 2012
I spent this weekend at Rethink Music Hackers’ Weekend building a music hack called Map of Music Styles (aka MOMS). This hack presents a visualization of over 1000 music styles. You can pan and zoom through the music space just like you can with Google maps. When you see an interesting style of music you can click on it to hear some samples of music of that style.
It is fun to explore all the different neighborhoods of music styles. Here’s the Asian corner:
Here’s the Hip-Hop neighborhood:
And a mega-cluster of ambient/chill-out music:
To build the app, I collected the top 2,000 or so terms via The Echo Nest API. For each term I calculated the most similar terms based upon artist overlap (for instance, the term ‘metal’ and ‘heavy metal’ are often applied to the same artists and so can be considered similar, where as ‘metal’ and ‘new age’ are rarely applied to the same artist and are, therefore, not similar). To layout the graph I used Gephi (Its like Photoshop for graphs) and exported the graph to SVG. After that it was just a bit of Javascript, HTML, and CSS to create the web page that will let you pan and zoom. When you click on a term, I fetch audio that matches the style via the Echo Nest and 7Digital APIs.
There are a few non-styles that snuck through – the occasional band name, or mood, but they don’t hurt anything so I let them hang out with the real styles. The app works best in Chrome. There’s a bug in the Firefox version that I need to work out.
Give it a try and let me know how you like it: Map of Music Styles
The Hack Day Manifesto
What do you need to do to put on a good hack event like a Music Hack Day? Read The Hack Day Manifesto for insights on what it takes to make sure you don’t have hack event fail. Here’s some choice bits:
Your 4MB DSL isn’t enough
Hack days have special requirements: don’t just trust anyone who tells you that “it’ll be fine”. Think about the networking issues, and verify that they work for the kind of capacity you are going to have. People from the venue or their commercial partner will tell you all sorts of things you want to hear but keep in the back of your mind that they may not have any clue what they are talking about. Given the importance of network access, if you are operating a commercial event consider requiring network performance as part of your contract with venues and suppliers.
Rock solid WiFi
Many commercial WiFi providers plan for much lower use than actually occurs at hack days. The network should be capable of handling at least 4 devices per attendee.
Don’t make people feel unwelcome
Avoid sexism and other discriminatory language or attitudes. Don’t make any assumptions about your attendees. Get someone who is demographically very different from you to check your marketing material through to see if it makes sense and isn’t offensive to someone who doesn’t share your background.
Read The Hack Day Manifesto. If you agree with the sentiment, and you have enough hacker juice to fork the manifesto, edit it and send a pull request, you are invited to add yourself to the list of supporters.
Slides for my Data Mining Music talk
Posted by Paul in events, The Echo Nest on March 15, 2012
I recently gave a talk on Data Mining Music at SXSW. It was a standing room only session, with an enthusiastic audience that asked great questions. It was a really fun time for me. I’ve posted the slides to Slideshare, but be warned that there are no speaker notes so it may not always be clear what any particular slide is about. There was lots of music in the talk, but unfortunately, it is not in the Slideshare PDF. The links below should flesh out most of the details and have some audio examples.
Related Links:
- Have artist names been getting longer?
- The Passion Index - Find the bands that have the most passionate fans
- Six Degrees of Black Sabbath - Using artist relationship data to build a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon for Music
- Frog-based playlisting - Building advanced playlists by finding paths through the artist space
- The Click Track Detector - Finding drummers that use a click track
- Looking for the Slow Build - Finding songs that have a gradual build
- Bohemian Rhapsichord - Turning a popular song into a musical instrument, with data.
- Midem Music Machine - Making a beautiful visualization of music
- The Swinger - Making any song swing
Thanks to everyone who attended.
Data Mining Music at SXSW
If you happen to be in Austin this week for SXSW consider attending my talk called Data Mining Music. It is all about the fun things you can discover about music when you have data about millions of songs and artists.
The talk is on Sunday, Marcy 11 at 5:00PM in the Rio Grande room of the Hilton Garden Inn. All the details are here: Data Mining Music
Boil the Frog
I’m at Music Apps Hack Weekend doing my favorite thing: hacking on music. I’ve just finished my hack called Boil the Frog. Boil the Frog is a Spotify App that will create playlists that gradually take you from one music style to another. It is like the proverbial story of the frog in the pot of water. If you heat the water gradually, the frog won’t notice and will happily sit in the pot until it becomes frog stew. With Boil the Frog you can do the same thing musically. Create a playlist that gradually takes your pre-teen from Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis, or perhaps more perversely the Kenny G fan to Cannibal Corpse.
To build the app I built an artist similarity graph of 100,000 of the most popular artists. I use The Echo Nest artist similarity to connect each artist to its four nearest neighbors. To find the path between any two artists I use a bidirectional Dijkstra shortest path algorithm. Most paths can be computed in less than 100ms.
The Spotify Apps API is the perfect hacking platform. You can build a Spotify app that has full access to the vast Spotify music catalog and artwork, along with access to the listener’s catalog. Since the Spotify Apps run in an embedded browser all of your web app programming skills apply. You can use jQuery, make calls to JSON APIs, use HTML 5 canvas. It is all there. Spotify has done a really good job putting together this platform. The only downside is that, unlike the web, it is hard to actually release Spotify apps, but the Spotify team is working to make this easier. I’d love to release Boil the Frog because it is really fun to make playlists that bring you from one music style to another. It is interesting to see what musical neighborhoods you wander through on your way. For instance, I made a Kenny G to Cannibal Corpse playlist. To get there, the playlist brought me from easy listening, to movie soundtracks and then through video game soundtracks to get to the heavy metal world. Cool stuff. If you want to see a playlist between two artists let me know in the comments and I’ll create and share the playlist with you.
I made a video of Boil the Frog in action. Check it out:
Update: I’ve just pushed the client code out to github: https://github.com/plamere/boilthefrog
Hackathons are not nonsense
Dave Winer says that Hackathons are nonsense. Specifically he says:
Hackathons are how marketing guys wish software were made.
However, to make good software, requires lots of thought, trial and error, evaluation, iteration, trying the ideas out on other users, learning, thinking, more trial and error, and on and on. At some point you say it ain’t perfect, but it’s useful, so let’s ship. That process, if the software is to be any good, doesn’t happen in 24 hours. Sometimes it takes years, if the idea is new enough.
Dave says that software is hard and you can’t you can’t expect to build shippable software in a day. That’s certainly true, and if the goal of a hackathon was to get a bunch of developers together to build and ship commercial software in a day, I’d agree with him. But that’s not the goal of any of the hackathons I’ve attended.
I’ve participated in and/or helped organize perhaps a dozen Music Hack Days. At a Music Hack Day, people who are interested in music and technology get together for a weekend to learn about music tech and to build something with it. The goal isn’t to ship a software product, it is to scratch that personal itch to do something cool with music. The people who come to a Music Hack Day are often not in the music tech space, but are interested in learning about all the music APIs and tech available. They come to learn and then use what they’ve learned to build something. At the most recent Music Hack Day in San Francisco, 200 hackers built 60 hacks including new musical instruments, new music discovery tools, social music apps and music games.
Photo by Thomas Bonte
Music Hack Days are not nonsense. They are incredibly creative weekends that have resulted in a 1,000 or more really awesome music hacks. Consider the hackathon to be the Haiku of programming. Instead of 17 syllables in 3 lines, a hacker has 24 hours. (Maybe we should call them Haikuthons;) I think the 24 hour constraint contributes to the creativity of the event.
Here are some of my favorite hacks built at recent Music Hack Days. Plenty of whimsy but no nonsense here:
- Drinkify – Answers the question “I’m listening to X, what should I drink?
- Invisible Instruments – Just what it says, musical instruments that you can’t see
- Bohemian Rhapsichord – Turns Queen’s Opus into a musical instrument
- Musaic – Discover music through photomoasics
- MIDEM Music Machine – a beautiful visualization of a song
- Tourrent Plans - Plan your tour based on where all the torrent downloaders are
- Stringer – a virtual string instrument
- The Swinger - Makes any song swing
The Midem Music Machine
Just a quick post before it is demo time. This weekend at MIDEM Hack Day, I teamed up this weekend with the famous Mr. Doob to build a music hack. We created the Midem Music Machine. It creates a beautiful visualization of music using The Echo Nest analyzer and Three.js. Here’s a pic:
As you can see, our hack was inspired by the Animusic folks. Working with Mr. Doob was awesome. He did just amazing stuff.
You can see the Midem Music Machine online here: Midem Music Machine. You’ll need a browser that supports WebGL like Chrome.
Music Hack Day London Photos
Thomas Bonte, master photographer has posted his photos for Music Hack Day London. Thomas really captures what it is like to be there in person. Thanks Thomas!
My Music Hack Day London hack
Posted by Paul in code, data, events, The Echo Nest on December 4, 2011
It is Music Hack Day London this weekend. However, I am in New England, not Olde England, so I wasn’t able to enjoy in all the pizza, beer and interesting smells that come with a 24 hour long hackathon. But that didn’t keep me from writing code. Since Spotify Apps are the cool new music hacking hotttnesss, I thought I’d create a Spotify related hack called the Artist Picture Show. It is a simple hack – it shows a slide show of artist images while you listen to them. It gets the images from The Echo Nest artist images API and from Flickr. It is a simple app, but I find the experience of being able to see the artist I’m listening too to be quite compelling.
Slightly more info on the hack here.
