This weekend a hundred hackers attended the Malmö Music Hack Weekend hosted by Minc Malmö. It was a great weekend. The inputs to the event were lots of great hackers, great food, flawless wifi, live DJs, bottomless popcorn and lots of very comfortable hacking spots. The outputs were a set of creative music hacks that give us a glimpse of what the future of music will be like.
The Hack Weekend was held here at Minc Malmö
There were a number of really good hacks, built by a great group of hackers.
The Beater team
Some of my favorite Echo Nest -based hacks were:
Beater – a context-aware MIDI.js based step sequencer. This awesome hack was The Echo Nest prize winner. It uses The Echo Nest API to identify the beats in a song and then allows you to add your own beat-aligned sequences on top of the song. Quite well done.
Beater
Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm was on hand covering the event. Be sure to read all of his coverage of the hacks.
Eliot awarding The Echo Nest prize to the Beater team
Mixie – a highly visual dynamic remixing app that allows you to create your mixes by connecting different songs together in a network. Mixie automatically selects different sections of songs and assembles them into a seamless mix. A very well put together hack.
The Mixie Demo
Echotap – a mobile web app that lets you play a song ‘drum-hero’ style. You have to tap or shake your phone in time to the music to hear it. When you stop, the song stops. When you speed up or slow down, so does the song.
Echotap Demo
Owegoo – A new feature for the Owegoo travel platform that helps you plan your next vacation based upon when and where your favorite artists are playing.
SBK – A rethinking of music journalism that goes directly to the music fan. This demo showed how fan-oriented music content such as reviews, articles, playlists, RSS feeds and DJ sets could be integrated into a monetizable online magazine. By Kixet.
SBK Demo
PartySaver – a party playlist app that displays artist images and song info of the currently playing song on all of the screens in the house.
Dogstep – this was my hack. It takes any song and re-renders it with a pack of barking, snarling, grunting, yipping and whining dogs.
All together about 20 hacks were demoed. Other nifty hacks include:
Careless Whistler – login into a web page by whistling your password
SynCloud – Synchronizes the playback of SoundCloud streams on multiple devices
StopDance – perhaps my favorite hack overall, StopDance is a game where all the players dance along to music. When the music stops, you have to stop dancing. If you don’t you are out. Last one still on the dance floor wins. StopDance automates the whole process, it plays the music, stops it at random times, and most importantly, using a web-cam watches the players and identifies the players who didn’t stop dancing fast enough.
The winner of the grand prize was LiveCloud a live coding music creation tool that allows a programmer-musician to create music by connecting and manipulating the different sound sources and sinks.
The food at the event was top notch. High quality and healthy food!
It was great to meet the folks from Neo4j at the event. They brought a whole lot of energy to the event, and showed off some of the really neat things you can do with a graph database. And they gave me this awesome t-shirt. How cool is that?!
I had a great time at the Malmö Music Hack Weekend. Special thanks to Maisa and Alex for organizing everything. They did a great job running a flawless event. Well done!
Maisa Dabus
Alex Esser
Music Machinery 