Archive for category fun
The most popular music tech attire …
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 by Paul 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!
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 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
On the trail – Mount Eisenhower
It’s been a good hiking season so far this year. I’ve spent 4 of the last 5 Saturdays on the trail (the weekend trip to London for the Music Hack Day kept me off the trail one weekend). Yesterday Jennie and I climbed Mt. Eisenhower, one of the southern presidentials in the White Mountains here in New Hampshire. It was a very rare day for the southern presidentials, the entire ridge was in the clear, with great views in all directions.
On the trail
Worst weather in America, but not today
Walking the ridge. Fall colors are already out in the North Country
Above treeline, with a view of Mt. Washington
At the summit. Cold, windy, with great views.
After the hike we popped over to the base station for the cog railway that goes to the top of Mount Washington.
The Cog Railway
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
Visual Music
Posted by Paul in code, data, events, fun, Music, The Echo Nest, visualization on July 28, 2010
The week long Visual Music Collaborative Workshop held at the Eyebeam just finished up. This was an invite-only event where participants did a deep dive into sound analysis techniques, openGL programming, and interfacing with mobile control devices.
Here’s one project built during the week that uses The Echo Nest analysis output:
(Via Aaron Meyers)
Novelty playlist ordering
[tweetmeme source= ‘plamere’ only_single=false] We’ve been building a new playlisting engine here at the Echo Nest. The engine is really neat – it lets you apply a whole range of very flexible constraints and orderings to make all sorts of playlists that would be a challenge for even the most savvy DJ. Playlists like 15 songs with a tempo between 120 and 130 BPM ordered by how danceable they are by very popular female artists that sound similar to Lady Gaga, that live near London, but never ever include tracks by The Spice Girls.
I was playing with the engine this weekend, writing some rules to make novelty playlists to test the limits of the engine. I started with rules typical for a similar-artist playlist: 15 songs long, filled with songs by artists similar to a seed artist (in this case Weezer), the first and last song must be by the seed artist, and no two consecutive songs can be by the same artist. Simple enough, but then I added two more rules to turn this into a novelty playlist that would be very hard for a human to make. See if you can guess what the two rules are. I think one of the rules is pretty obvious, but the second is a bit more subtle. Post your guesses in the comments.
0 Tripping Down the Freeway - Weezer
1 Yer All I've Got Ttonight - The Smashing Pumpkins
2 The Most Beautiful Things - Jimmy Eat World
3 Someday You Will Be Loved - Death Cab For Cutie
4 Don't Make Me Prove It - Veruca Salt
5 The Sacred And Profane - Smashing Pumpkins, The
6 Everything Is Alright - Motion City Soundtrack
7 The Ego's Last Stand - The Flaming Lips
8 Don't Believe A Word - Third Eye Blind
9 Don's Gone Columbia - Teenage Fanclub
10 Alone + Easy Target - Foo Fighters
11 The Houses Of Roofs - Biffy Clyro
12 Santa Has a Mullet - Nerf Herder
13 Turtleneck Coverup - Ozma
14 Perfect Situation - Weezer
Here’s another playlist – with a different set of two novelty rules, with a seed artist of Led Zeppelin. Again, if you can guess the rules, post a comment.
0 El Niño - Jethro Tull
1 Cheater - Uriah Heep
2 Hot Dog - Led Zeppelin
3 One Thing - Lynyrd Skynyrd
4 Nightmare - Black Sabbath
5 Ezy Ryder - The Jimi Hendrix Experience
6 Soulshine - Govt Mule
7 The Gypsy - Deep Purple
8 I'll Wait - Van Halen
9 Slow Down - Ozzy Osbourne
10 Civil War - Guns N' Roses
11 One Rainy Wish - Jimi Hendrix
12 Overture (Live) - Grand Funk Railroad
13 Larger Than Life - Gov'T Mule
Keith Moon meets Animal
Another vafromb.py masterpiece from joshmillard.
Music Machinery 