Paul
I'm the Director of Developer Community at The Echo Nest, a research-focused music intelligence startup that provides music information services to developers and partners through a data mining and machine listening platform. I am especially interested in hybrid music recommenders and using visualizations to aid music discovery.
The Echo Nest gets Personal
Posted in code, Music, playlist, recommendation, remix, The Echo Nest, web services on October 15, 2010
Duke University Archives
Here at the Echo Nest just added a new feature to our APIs called Personal Catalogs. This feature lets you make all of the Echo Nest features work in your own world of music. With Personal Catalogs (PCs) you can define application or user specific catalogs (in terms of artists or songs) and then use these catalogs to drive the behavior of other Echo Nest APIs. PCs open the door to all sorts of custom apps built on the Echo Nest platform. Here are some examples:
Create better genius-style playlists – With PCs I can create a catalog that contains all of the songs in my iTunes collection. I can then use this catalog with the Echo Nest Playlist API to generate interesting playlists based upon my own personal collection. I can create a playlist of my favorite, most danceable songs for a party, or I can create a playlist of slow, low energy, jazz songs for late night reading music.
Create hyper-targeted recommendations – With PCs I can make a catalog of artists and then use the artist/similar APIs to generate recommendations within this catalog. For instance, I could create an artist catalog of all the bands that are playing this weekend in Boston and then create Music Hack Day recommender that tells each visitor to Boston what bands they should see in Boston based upon their musical tastes.
Get info on lots of stuff – people often ask questions about their whole music collection. Like, ‘what are all the songs that I have that are at 113 BPM?‘, or ‘what are the softest songs?’ Previously, to answer these sorts of questions, you’d have to query our APIs one song at a time – a rather tedious and potentially lengthy operation (if you had, say, 10K tracks). With PCs, you can make a single catalog for all of your tracks and then make bulk queries against this catalog. Once you’ve created the catalog, it is very quick to read back all the tempos in your collection.
Represent your music taste – since a Personal Catalog can contain info such as playcounts, skips, and ratings for all of the artists and songs in your collection, it can serve as an excellent proxy to your music taste. Current and soon to be released APIs will use personal catalogs as a representation of your taste to give you personalized results. Playlisting, artist similarity, music recommendations all personalized based on you listening history.
These examples just scratch the surface. We hope to see lots of novel applications of Personal Catalogs. Check out the APIs, and start writing some code.
The Music Hack Day Boston t-shirt
The design by Jocelyn Petko, modeled by Ben Lacker.
The most popular music tech attire …
Posted in fun on October 14, 2010
The Echo Nest Sweatsedo in the Thumbplay video
Naturally, if you are reading this you’ll want one of your own. But there’s only one way to get one.
Hacking on the Echo Nest at Boston Music Hack Day
Posted in code, events, fun, The Echo Nest on October 13, 2010
Kind of Blue
Kind of Green
If you are going to the Music Hack Day Boston this weekend, you may want to consider creating an hack based on the Echo Nest APIs. The Echo Nest is offering a prize for the best hack that is built based upon Echo Nest technology. The prize is the much coveted Echo Nest Sweatsedo. The softness, the coolness and the ‘blueness’ of this casual attire is unsurpassed by the clothing offered by any other music technology company. However, we realize that not everyone can wear the sweatsedo with proper style. For those, who are not cool enough to wear the Echo Nest sweatsedo, they can opt for the alternate prize of $1,000 cash. So your choice is for a prize is a Kind of Blue, or a Kind of Green.
But, wait! There’s more. Since we are unveiling two new APIs at Music Hack Day weekend, we are going to offer not one, but two prizes, one to each of the two best hacks that use the Echo Nest APIs. If you create one of the two best hacks that use the Echo Nest, you will get to chose from the ‘Kind of Blue’ or the ‘Kind of Green’ prize. So get hacking!
Hardware hacking at Music Hack Day Boston
Posted in events on October 12, 2010
There will be some opportunities for organized hardware hacking at this weekend’s Music Hack Day Boston in the form of afternoon workshops. All the details are on the Music Hack Day Workshops page. Here’s just a teaser to wet your appetite.
Electric Eels Workshop by Noah Vawter with Justin from Burnkit 2600. This project introduces a mobile platform for melodic and percussive electronic music instruments. It encourages playing them more like traditional instruments- electrical energy is produced on a note-by-note basis from its players’ movements.
Atari Punk Console Workshop – Jimmie Rodgers will lead a workshop on building Atari Punk Consoles. The Atari Punk Console is a simple synthesizer with a wide range of sounds. It is so named because the sounds generated are similar to those of the early Atari consoles.
Atari Punk Consoles
Pen Plotter & Chiplotle workshop – While not exactly hardware hacking, it is definitely old school. Douglas Repetto and Brian Whitman will show you how to plot your beautiful music visualizations or whatever else on quite possibly the sexiest of all paper output mechanisms — early 1980s HPGL pen plotters!
The sexiest of all paper output mechanisms
Programmable Audio Effects in a Sketch Environment with LeafLabs’ Maple – by Okie Williams. In this 2 hour workshop you will learn how you can use Maple with a little extra circuitry (op-amps, resistors, capacitors) to program your own audio effects in an Arduino-like sketch environment and focus mainly on programming effects instead of hardware.
Audio and Guitar effects on Maple
What happens at a Music Hack Day?
Posted in Music on October 8, 2010
So what is a Music Hack Day really like? Here’s a quick rundown of some of the things that will happen at the Music Hack Day.
9AM – 10AM Saturday morning – Registration – hackers start to arrive between 9AM and 10AM for registration.
Welcome to the Microsoft NERD
You get your badge, wander around the venue (which is graciously provided by Microsoft) have a muffin and a cup of coffee and meet up with old friends and / or make new friends.
Smiling faces greet you at MHD Registration
Informal hacking space at the NERD
This is a good time to start scoping around for hacking partners if you think you might need some help building a hack. If you want to get a head start in connecting with other hackers consider posting to the Ideas page on the Music Hack Day Boston Wiki.
Group hacking
Meet interesting people at Music Hack Day
10AM – Opening remarks – someone will walk you through the weekend, and give you an idea of what to expect, and tell you all the important info like where the bathrooms are.
Dave Haynes kicks of Music Hack Day London
10:15 – Lightning pitches – a big part of the Music Hack Day is the sharing of knowledge about various music-related technologies, whether it’s an API, a library, technique, hardware gizmo. During the lightning pitches, everyone who has a technology that they’d like to talk about gives a 60 second description of their technology.
Getting ready for the lightning rounds
11:00 Morning Workshops – The morning workshops are 15 to 20 minute overviews of a particular technology. There may be be 10 to 20 workshops run in a two hour period. Depending on the number workshop, there may be more than one track, so pay attention during the lightning pitches to figure out which workshops you’d like to attend.
Waiting for the workshops to start
Some companies offer prizes to the best hack that uses their technology. If you want to try to win something cool like a concert tickets, an iPad, or some cash, pay attention to the workshops to see who is giving out prizes.
The Echo Nest workshop
The Songkick workshop
1:00PM Lunch time – lunch is free – but don’t let it stop you from hacking.
Eat or hack?
2:00PM Hacking commences – after lunch – formal hacking begins. You have 24 hours to build something cool that is related to music. Hacking will finish up at 2:30PM on Sunday.
Hacking commences
2:00PM Afternoon workshops – In the afternoon, there are some in-depth workshops where you can learn how to build or do something. The workshops (as with everything at the Music Hack Day), is optional, you can chose to attend a workshop or find a quiet spot and work on your hack. Some of the workshops may be scheduled on an ad hoc basis (anyone can put on a workshop, just post a note on the ‘workshops board’). There are 3 hardware oriented workshops, at the Boston Music Hack Day that will give you an opportunity to build or interact with hardware (a rare thing for many of us software types).
Pen plotter & Chiplotle workshop Douglas Repetto and Brian Whitman will show you how to plot your beautiful music visualizations or whatever else on quite possibly the sexiest of all paper output mechanisms — early 1980s HPGL pen plotters! You’ll learn how to use Chiplotle, a Python bridge for live HPGL drawing control, and we’ll have a a few plotters on hand for everyone to use. Plus, there will be plotters available for hacking after the workshop.
More info:
- http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/chiplotle/
- http://www.flickr.com/groups/chiplotle/pool/
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T20-KcCGokU
Electric Eels Workshop
“Electric Eels” workshop – by Noah Vawter – This project introduces a mobile platform for electronic music instruments. It encouragesplaying them more like traditional instruments. The new techniques this project introduces extend the role of electricity generation – Electrical energy for every note comes from its players’ movements.
Atari Punk Console workshop
Jimmie Rodgers will lead a workshop on building Atari Punk Consoles. The Atari Punk Console is a simple synthesizer with a wide range of sounds. It is so named because the sounds generated are similar to those of the early Atari consoles. In this workshop you will learn the basics of the timing circuits used to make these crazy sounds. You will also learn how to solder, and how to change the the sounds with your fingers as the contact, or even using light to make a simple light Theremin.
Jimmie's workshop
All parts and tools included in the costs. Additional parts will be available, so you will be able to customize your APC with lights, touch contacts, photo resistors, etc. You are encouraged to find a fun case for your APC and bring it (cigar box, mint tin, Mr. Potato Head other plastic toy, etc), anything hollow that can hold a deck of cards would do. If you do not have a case, then Altoid tins will be available at the workshop.
Hardware hacking
6PM – Dinner – At 6PM the pizzas arrive. Get a slice or two and some soda (the beer comes later), and get back to your hack. Remember, eating and sleeping is for the weak
Eating is for the weak
9:30 PM – Leg stretching time. – Hacking continues until around 9:30 PM when the Microsoft NERD will close. At that point hacking shifts to the Echo Nest (a few T stops away).
Onto the T to get to the Echo Nest
10:00 PM Hacking Continues at the Echo Nest
The Echo Nest offices
The venue for overnight hacking is at the Echo Nest in Davis Square – 4 stops away on the T from the main venue. At the Echo Nest there will be some beer, some live music provided by Javelin, and plenty of comfortable hacking space for the hardcore hackers.
Late night hacking
Overnight hacking is where all the magic happens.
Overnight hacking in London
Overnight hacking at the Echo Nest
8AM Sunday Morning – On Sunday morning, hacking finishes up at the Echo Nest and will return to the Microsoft NERD at 9AM, where you’ll find some more coffee and light breakfast. Hacking continues thorough lunch.
Remember, eating is for the weak.
2:30 PM Hacking finishes. By 2:30 PM you should have information about your hack posted to the wiki. Only hacks included on the wiki by 2:30 PM will be included in the final presentations.
Last minute hacking
3:00 PM – Final Demos – This is the time to show your stuff! Once all the hacks are complete, everyone will move to the big room for the hack demos. We’ll be joined by about 100 non-hackers who are here to see all the demos. During the demo time, everyone who managed to get a hack listed onto the hacks wiki by 2:30 will get 2 minutes to present their hack.
Giving a demo - Flight of the bumble bee on guitar
There will be people from the music industry, the press, and the tech world in attendance so it doesn’t hurt to try to make your 2 minutes in the spotlight memorable. We should have two projectors setup so each hack presenter should have 2 minutes to setup and then 2 minutes to present.
Demoing the big piano
Ben demos the roomba recon
Giving good demo is fun
We will be ruthless with the timing. When your 2 minutes are up, we’ll start the next demo, so make sure you get to the point quickly
5:00 PM – final awards – At 5PM the panel of judges will gather to pick the winners of the prizes, and present the awards. But of course, everyone is a winner.
Announcing the prize winners
6:00PM – After all is done, we will find a local pub to get some refreshment.
Time for a beer
It is sure to be a good time.
Photos from flickr photographers: Elizabeth Thomsen, Dave Haynes, Thomas Bonte, Ben Reyes, Brad Searles, aroscoe, habber, David Noël, imelda, James Wheare, narq,
My Music Hack Day t-shirt …
Of course I wasn’t eligible for the Music Hack Day tshirt design challenge. But that didn’t stop me from making one anyway. Here’s my non-entry. I made it on Zazzle, so I guess you could actually order it if you want to.
Music Machinery 