Archive for category events
Music Hack Day Boston tee-shirt design challenge!
We love the Music Hackday Tee-Shirt. But we need a new design! So, in the tradition of the Music Hack Day you have 24 hours to hack the tee-shirt and come up with a new design. If we chose your design we’ll give you credit on the Music Hack Day Boston web site and you’ll have the joy of seeing 200 hackers wearing the fruits of your labors.
Here are the requirements:
Create a one or two-color design and submit it as an EPS by email to paul@echonest.com by 5PM EDT October 6. If you have any questions, just leave them in the comments here.
Update: Here’s an EPS of the Music Hack Day Logo.
Update 2: Dave points to even more logo resources
The Music App Summit
Posted by Paul in events, The Echo Nest on September 20, 2010
The Music App Summit being held in San Francisco is just a couple of weeks away. At the summit, Billboard will be presenting the first ever Music App Awards that highlight the best and most innovative mobile music apps. The finalists are:
Best Music Engagement App:
Tap Tap Revenge 3
SoundHound Infinity
Mix Me In2 Taylor Swift
Best Music Creation App:
LaDiDa
AmpliTude iRig
MorphWiz
Best Music Streaming App:
Rhapsody
MOG
Thumbplay
Best Touring App:
Live Phish
R5
Bonnaroo
Best Artist-based App:
Linkin Park 8-Bit Revolution
I Am T-Pain
TouchChords: Jimmy Vaughan
Best Branded App:
50s Sound Lab
ZOOZbeat Sprite
Gibson
The summit includes lots of good speakers too, including keynotes by:
Janus Friis, Co-founder, Rdio, Skype, Kazaa, Joost, Atomico Ventures
Evan Harrison, EVP Clear Channel Radio, President Clear Channel Radio Digital
Jim Lucchese, CEO, The Echo Nest
Jim has worked in digital music strategy and corporate development for about 10 years. Before The Echo Nest, Jim was a music lawyer at Greenberg Traurig, specializing in music and digital media deals. Prior to GT, Jim held sales and corporate development positions at Hughes, where he managed market development and sales with annual revenues exceeding $20 Million.
Matt Murphy, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Matt Murphy is a Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers where he manages the iFund, which focuses on defining applications for the mobile internet. Matt is either a Director or works closely with the management teams of Shazam, shopkick, Ocarina and others. Previously, Matt was a board observer at Google and a Director at Peakstream and Dash Navigation
Dave Stewart, Producer, Solo Artist and Mobile Music Consultant/Evangelist
Ge Wang, Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Creative Officer, Smule and Assistant Professor of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Ge Wang is the Co-founder, CTO, and CEO of Smule, a developer of interactive sonic media. Smule’s bestselling iPhone and iPad apps include Glee, I Am T-Pain, and others. Dr. Wang is an assistant professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He is chief-architect and co-creator of ChucK audio programming language, and founding director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (SLOrk) and the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (MoPhO).
If you are interested in going, you can sign up here – and if you use the registration code SPMEL you will save $100.
Even without Zooey, Music Hack Days are pretty awesome
Posted by Paul in events, Music, The Echo Nest on September 9, 2010
Paul + Matt @ The Hub - Photo by Thomas Bonte
This picture represents the perfection of the Music Hack Day. Here I am sitting at my computer, in a dark room, totally focused on building my hack, while I sit next to the music technology superstar Matt Ogle of Last.fm. In front of me is a beer, a red bull and a glass of Ben Fields‘ private stock. What could be better than this! (Well, I suppose sitting on my right, just out of view could be Zooey Deschanel, that might be better). If you want to find yourself in such a position, then consider signing up for one of the upcoming Music Hack Days. There’s one in Barcelona on October 2,3 and there’s one in Boston on October 16, 17. Registrations are going fast, so sign up early to guarantee that you’ll have a seat.
Music Hack Day London
I’ve just returned from my weekend in London where I participated in the Music Hack Day held at the Guardian Offices in London. The event was attended by nearly 200 hackers who spent the weekend learning about new music technologies and then using those technologies to build something new. This was a fantastic event that seemingly went off without a hitch. The internet worked, there was plenty of coffee, sodas and beer, and it was a very comfortable space to get stuff done. And people got things done – over 50 hacks were built – Here are some of my favorites:
Speakatron – A program that looks at you through your web cam and plays a sound when you open your mouth. It can tell what shape you’re making and how high your mouth is on the screen as synthesis parameters. This one was the big crowd pleaser. Here’s a pic of Marek giving his demo:
Photo by Thomas Bonte
Future of Music 2010 – Brian Whitman presents the best music recommendation technology ever – Future of Music (2010)” is a Mac OS X app that scans your iTunes library and computes the music you are not supposed to listen to anymore based on your preferences. It then helpfully deletes it from iTunes and your hard drive. Skips the recycle bin. Just like other recommender systems, it uses a lot of fancy math (and data from Echo Nest and last.fm) that really doesn’t matter in the end. Just click the button and let it take care of your life. Yes, indeed, this app erases the music from your hard drive that you shouldn’t be listening too.
Future of Music 2010
Lazy DJ – LazyDJ is an app for lazy DJs who do not want to think about what song they should play next.
Radio 1 Playlist Squirrel – Using small woodland animals to help discover music. You have to see it to understand it. Great demo. Hope they put it online, because, really the world needs more music discovering squirrels.
Photo by Thomas Bronte
Radio Map – a real time browser for on-line radio – Sebastian Heise and Michael Hlatk analyzed the audio for hundreds of Internet radio stations and built a visualization of the Internet radio space that lets you browse for stations based on music similarity.
Photo by Thomas Bronte
Auto Score Tubing – this is an amazing hack – using score synchronizing tech from Queen Mary’s music researchers, the folks from Musescore creates a hack that automatically synchronizes a music score with a youtube performance of that score. Check out the video, it is awesome.
BumbleTab – a very patient guitar tutor – waits patiently for you to play the right notes, then stiches all of your right notes into an awesome song:
Piracy – Making music piracy more like real piracy… Think Geocaching for music…
MashBox – a community driven mashable jukebox – which you can use to make mashups like Beat and Whip It. There’s a nifty prezo on the process they used to create the mashup.
Earth Destroyers – this is my hack – it is a web app that tells you which bands have earth destroying tours.
It is almost like being there:To get a taste of what it was like being at the Music Hack Day be sure to check out Thomas Bronte’s photos of the event – in addition to being the CEO of musescore, Thomas is also an excellent photographer: Music Hack Day London 2010 Slide show
Click to see the Music Hack Day Slide show by Thomas Bonte
Congrats to Dave Haynes and all of the team that put together the Music Hack Day London. It was a fantastic event!
Dave Haynes closes the Music Hack Day
Cool music panels at SXSW 2011
I was going to write a post describing all of the cool looking music-oriented panels that have been proposed for SXSW 2011, but debcha at zed equals zee beat me to it. Be sure to read Deb’s SXSWi 2011 panel proposals in music and tech post. Some of the panels I’m looking to the most are:
Digital Music Smackdown: The Best Digital Music Service – In what is expected to be a heated and fiercely competitive discussion, C and VP-level executives from four digital music companies (MOG, Spotify, Pandora and Rhapsody) battle it out over the title of “Best Digital Music Service. This could be fun if it is really a smackdown, but I suspect that the execs will be very polite and complimentary of each other’s services leading to a boring panel. I hope I’m wrong. Also, where’s Last.fm? – they should be on the panel too.
We Built this App on RocknRoll: Style Matters – For an inherently auditory medium, music is ingrained with style. From 12″ artwork and niche mp3 blogs to the latest design on your sweatshirt or skate deck, music has always been analogous with visual culture. So what happens when you overlay this complex fabric of cultural values and personal identities on what is already a thorny process: building and launching a music app. – Hannah of Last.fm and Anthony of Hype Machine talk about the design of music apps. These two know their stuff. Should be really interesting.
Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain the Same? Metadata may be an afterthought when it comes to most people’s digital music collections, but when it comes to finding, buying, selling, rating, sharing, or describing music, little matters more. Metadata defines how we interact and talk about music—from discreet bits like titles, styles, artists, genres to its broader context and history. Metadata builds communities and industries, from the local fan base to the online social network. Its value is immense. But who owns it? This panel is on my Must See list.
Expressing yourself musically with Mobile Technology – This is a panel with Ge Wang, founder/CTO of Smule talking about creating music on mobile devices. Ge is an awesome speaker and gives great demo. Don’t miss this one.
Music APIs – A Choreographed Dance with Devices? – This panel discussion focuses on real-world examples beyond the fundamentals or technical aspects of an API. Attend this panel and review success stories from the pros that demonstrate how an API brings content, software, and hardware together. Looks like a good Music APIs 101 for biz types.
I would be remiss if I didn’t pimp my own panels. Be sure to consider (and maybe even comment on / vote for ) these panels:
Love, Music & APIs. – Consider this to be the Music Hack Day panel. Dave Haynes (SoundCloud) and I will talk about the impact that Music APIs are having on the world of music and how programmers will soon be the new music gamekeeper.
Finding Music With Pictures: Data Visualization for Discovery: In this panel I’ll look at how visualizations can be used to help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive, immersive 3D environments.
The folks at SXSW are looking for input on these panels to help decide what makes it onto the schedule, so if any of these strike your fancy, head on over to the panel descriptions and add your comments.
Upbeat and Quirky, With a Bit of a Build: Interpretive Repertoires in Creative Music Search
Posted by Paul in events, Music, music information retrieval, research on August 13, 2010
Upbeat and Quirky, With a Bit of a Build: Interpretive Repertoires in Creative Music Search
Charlie Inskip, Andy MacFarlane and Pauline Rafferty
ABSTRACT Pre-existing commercial music is widely used to accompany moving images in films, TV commercials and computer games. This process is known as music synchronisation. Professionals are employed by rights holders and film makers to perform creative music searches on large catalogues to find appropriate pieces of music for syn- chronisation. This paper discusses a Discourse Analysis of thirty interview texts related to the process. Coded examples are presented and discussed. Four interpretive re- pertoires are identified: the Musical Repertoire, the Soundtrack Repertoire, the Business Repertoire and the Cultural Repertoire. These ways of talking about music are adopted by all of the community regardless of their interest as Music Owner or Music User.
Music is shown to have multi-variate and sometimes conflicting meanings within this community which are dynamic and negotiated. This is related to a theoretical feedback model of communication and meaning making which proposes that Owners and Users employ their own and shared ways of talking and thinking about music and its context to determine musical meaning. The value to the music information retrieval community is to inform system design from a user information needs perspective.
What Makes Beat Tracking Difficult? A Case Study on Chopin Mazurkas
Posted by Paul in events, ismir, music information retrieval, research on August 13, 2010
What Makes Beat Tracking Difficult? A Case Study on Chopin Mazurkas
Peter Grosche, Meinard Müller and Craig Stuart Sapp
ABSTRACT – The automated extraction of tempo and beat information from music recordings is a challenging task. Especially in the case of expressive performances, current beat tracking approaches still have significant problems to accurately capture local tempo deviations and beat positions. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation framework for detecting critical passages in a piece of music that are prone to tracking errors. Our idea is to look for consistencies in the beat tracking results over multiple performances of the same underlying piece. As another contribution, we further classify the critical passages by specifying musical properties of certain beats that frequently evoke trac ing errors. Finally, considering three conceptually different beat tracking procedures, we conduct a case study on the basis of a challenging test set that consists of a variety of piano performances of Chopin Mazurkas. Our experimental results not only make the limitations of state-of-the-art beat trackers explicit but also deepens the understanding of the underlying music material.
An Audio Processing Library for MIR Application Development in Flash
Posted by Paul in events, ismir, music information retrieval, research on August 13, 2010
An Audio Processing Library for MIR Application Development in Flash
Jeffrey Scott, Raymond Migneco, Brandon Morton, Christian M. Hahn, Paul Diefenbach and Youngmoo E. Kim
The Audio processing Library for Flash affords music-IR researchers the opportunity to generate rich, interactive, real-time music-IR driven applications. The various lev-els of complexity and control as well as the capability to execute analysis and synthesis simultaneously provide a means to generate unique programs that integrate content based retrieval of audio features. We have demonstrated the versatility and usefulness of ALF through the variety of applications described in this paper. As interest in mu sic driven applications intensifies, it is our goal to enable the community of developers and researchers in music-IR and related fields to generate interactive web-based media.
Music21: A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musicology and Symbolic Music Data
Music21: A Toolkit for Computer-Aided Musicology and Symbolic Music Data
Michael Scott Cuthbert and Christopher Ariza
ABSTRACT – Music21 is an object-oriented toolkit for analyzing, searching, and transforming music in symbolic (score- based) forms. The modular approach of the project allows musicians and researchers to write simple scripts rapidly and reuse them in other projects. The toolkit aims to pro- vide powerful software tools integrated with sophisticated musical knowledge to both musicians with little pro- gramming experience (especially musicologists) and to programmers with only modest music theory skills.
Music21 looks to be a pretty neat toolkit for analyzing and manipulating symbolic music. It’s like Echo Nest Remix for MIDI. The blog has lots more info: music21 blog. You can get the toolkit here: music21
State of the Art Report: Audio-Based Music Structure Analysis
Posted by Paul in events, ismir, music information retrieval, research on August 13, 2010
State of the Art Report: Audio-Based Music Structure Analysis
Jouni Paulus, Meinard Müller and Anssi Klapuri
ABSTRACT – Humans tend to organize perceived information into hierarchies and structures, a principle that also applies to music. Even musically untrained listeners unconsciously analyze and segment music with regard to various musical aspects, for example, identifying recurrent themes or detecting temporal boundaries between contrasting musical parts. This paper gives an overview of state-of-the- art methods for computational music structure analysis, where the general goal is to divide an audio recording into temporal segments corresponding to musical parts and to group these segments into musically meaningful categories. There are many different criteria for segmenting and structuring music audio. In particular, one can identify three conceptually different approaches, which we refer to as repetition-based, novelty-based, and homogeneity- based approaches. Furthermore, one has to account for different musical dimensions such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre. In our state-of-the-art report, we address these different issues in the context of music structure analysis, while discussing and categorizing the most relevant and recent articles in this field.
This presentation is an overview of the music structure analysis problem, and the methods proposed for solving it. The methods have been divided into three categories: novelty-based approaches, homogeneity-based approaches, and repetition-based approaches. The comparison of different methods has been problematic because of the differring goals, but current evaluations suggest that none of the approaches is clearly superior at this time, and that there is still room for considerable improvements.
Music Machinery 