Archive for category Music
The Artist’s Hack
Sunday at SXSW was the Artist’s Hack – where passionate developers from around the world gathered to build cool stuff. Artist’s Hack was organized by Backplane and Spotify and is dedicated to building the future of music, art, video and collaborative though on the web and mobile during SXSW.
The hack was held at Raptor House – a short walk from downtown Austin. There was plenty of bandwidth, good food and beverages for the 8 hour hackathon. APIs were in abundance: Spotify, The Echo Nest, SendGrid, Twilio, Youtube, Klout, Paypal, Gimbal, SeatGeek, Aviary, Etsy, Topspin, Chute, Dropbox, Music Dealers and others were all there in force offering their technology for hackers to use.
Hackers built around 20 hacks during the event. Some of my favorites are:
- biomuse – creates playlists based upon your biometrics. This was built on top of the biobeats platform. Quite neat stuff. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- Jamblot – visualize your song history in a creative way to commemorate any period of your life that affected your music choice. Jamblot draws your song history for you. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- Party Together – ambient automatic shared playlists for your party. Winner of one of the Echo Nest prizes.
- We browse in public – Stream all of your browser activity live to others. Chat with others based on their activity.
- Bundio – Monetize dropbox.
My hack is A longer life for post-rock fans. This was my first time using the Twilio API. It was a lot of fun to build. The Twilio API and whole developer experience is awesome. Any company with an API should try to emulate what Twilio does.
One novel aspect of the event was that Cory Booker was one of the judges. Here he is watching Danny Kirschner give the Bundio demo
Cory is a pro – when there was a power outage that delayed some of the demos, Cory conducted an impromptu ‘interview’ with one of the founders of Backplane while the crew scurried to restore the power.
All in all, the Artist’s Hack was great fun, with lots of creative hacks. Well done Spotify and Backplane!
A longer life for post-rock fans
I like to listen to post-rock. Unfortunately, post-rock bands tend to have very long names like ‘Explosions in the Sky’, ‘God Speed you black emperor’, and ‘This will Destroy You’. I have a long commute and I will find that I am frequently risking my life trying to type a long band name into my music player. I wish Siri supported non-itunes players like Spotify, but until then I need a way to tell Spotify to play music by bands with long names. If I don’t, I will die in a fiery crash on Route 3 in Lowell Mass. A horrible way to go. So this weekend at the Artists Hack I built something to solve this problem. It lets you play music in Spotify without having to type long artist names. Here’s how it works.
I used Twilio to set up a phone number such that if you text it an artist name, it will respond with a spotify link to a song by that artist. You can add the phone number to your contacts as “music player”, You can then use Siri in a dialog like so:
Me: Send a text to Music Player
Siri: What would you like it to say
Me: Explosion in the Sky
Siri: OK, I’ll send it
A few seconds later I get a text message back with a link to a popular track by Explosions in the Sky. I tap the link and Spotify opens and plays the song. It is about as simple a hack as can be, but it solves a real problem for me. Here’s the screenshot:
If you want to use it – send a text with the artist name (and nothing else) to 603 821 4328. The code is on github. Update … much to my surprise this hack won two prizes at the hackathon – the Twilio 1st prize and the overall 3rd prize.
Hacking Blindness
Meet Mandy. She’s a musician and a multimedia artist. She’s also losing her vision. She is on a quest – to push forward interfaces for non-visual music production to make it easier for those with vision impairments to use modern technology to create music.
We in the music tech community, especially the music hackers among us are in an excellent position to help Mandy take some steps toward reaching her goal. Anyone who has been to a Music Hack Day has seen the wide range of non-traditional music interfaces that we create. We’ve made Music gloves, leap-motion-based mixers and orchestras, invisible violins made with iphones, remixing tools that use makey-makey, music controllers made out of kinects, arduinos, webcams and even neckties and coat racks. We build things that make music. With a little guidance we should be able to build things that will help the visually impaired make music too. Mandy has just started a blog: Hacking Blindness where she is writing about her journey to help develop new and immersive ways for low vision and blind musicians to perform and manipulate. sound. If you are a music techie/hacker and are interested in learning more about this go to Mandy’s blog and join in the discussion. It is just getting started. I hope that in an upcoming Music Hack Day we can have Mandy come and help us understand how we can help her #hackblindness.
The Tufts Hackathon
Posted by Paul in events, Music, tuftshackathon on February 26, 2013
Last weekend, Barbara Duckworth and Jennie Lamere teamed up at the Tufts Hackathon to build a music hack. Here’s Barbara’s report from the hackathon:
Jen Lamere and Barbara Duckworth presenting:
Cinemusic – created at Tufts Hackathon
For our second hack day, Jen Lamere and I were wildly successful. Going into the Tufts hackathon, we knew that we wanted to create a hack involving music, but we didn’t want the hassle of having to make hardware to go along with it, like in our last hack, HighFive Hero.
As we were walking to the building in which the hackathon was held, we decided on making a program that would suggest a movie based on its soundtrack. The user would tell us their favorite artists, and we would find a movie soundtrack that contained similar music, the idea being that if you like the soundtrack, the movie would also be of your tastes. So, lets say you have an unnatural love for Miley Cyrus. Type that in, and our music-to-movie program would tell you to watch Another Cinderella Story, with Selena Gomez on the soundtrack. With Selena also being a Disney Channel star and of similar singing caliber, the suggestion makes sense.
Barbie and Jen hacking away (photo by Ming Chow)
We used The Echo Nest API to search for similar artists, and with the help of Paul Lamere, utilized Spotify’s fantastic tagging system to compile a huge data file of artists and soundtracks, which we then sorted through. We also added a cool last-minute feature using the Spotify API, which would start playing the soundtrack right as the movie suggestion was given. Jen and I hope to iron out any bugs that are currently in our program, and turn it into a web app.
Our (if I do say so myself) pretty awesome hack, combined with our amateur status, won us the rookie award at Tufts Hackathon! Jen and I will both be proudly wearing our new “GitHub swag” and we will hopefully find a way to put the AWS credits to good use. Thank you to everyone at Tufts, for organizing such a fantastic event!
Barbara and Jennie reviewing their swag options
Talk Radio – control Rdio with the new Web Speech API
Control your radio with your mouth
- Play music by Carly Rae Jepsen
- Play music like Weezer
- Play some brutal death metal
- Play some christmas music
- Play slow music by Beyoncé
- Play fast music by Beyoncé
- Play chill music in the style of smooth jazz
- Play some screamo
Pro tip – the artist or genre should always be at the end of your utterance.
The hack is an exploration of how well an off-the-shelf speech large vocabulary speech recognizer would work in the music domain. Music has lots of hard names like deadmau5, p!nk, !!! and many domain-specific terms like ‘screamo’, ‘hip hop’, ‘shoegaze’. I am actually quite surprised at how well this works. The Google speech recognizer does a good job at understanding most of the neologism like ‘screamo’ and ‘shoegaze’, and does an excellent job at recognizing popular artist names like Jay-Z and Beyonce. For unusual artist names, The Echo Nest artist search does a really good job of finding what you meant. So when the speech recognizer returns “play music by chick chick chick”, The Echo Nest artist search can turn the artist search for “chick chick chick” into “!!!” with no problems. Similarly the speech recognizer will return “dead mouse” which The Echo Nest will resolve to ‘deadmau5’.
We can also field more general music queries. If a style query returns no results, it is re-submitted as a general artist-description query. This lets you find more esoteric music “big hair bands”.
Issues
You have to grant the app permission to access the microphone for every utterance. This can be alleviated in the near future after a few API issues are sorted out. Until then, the app is all Cancel or Allow. (And yes, it is incredibly annoying). This is all sorted now.
This hack was built at the Tufts Hackathon 2013. For me, it was a half-a-hackday with lots of time spent supporting The Echo Nest APIs to folks who had never used it before and traveling in the snow. Still, it was fun to use the nifty new Web Speech API that just shipped this week in Chrome Version 25.
The Bonhamizer
Here’s my Music Hack Day San Francisco hack: The Bonhamizer. This hack lets you hear what it would be like if John Bonham was in your favorite band.
It works pretty well on many songs, and not so well on others. I hope to smooth out the rough edges in the next few days. Here are some of my favorites:
The code for this hack is on github at github/echonest/bonhamizer
SF Music Hack Day 2013
Mark your calendars. The 4th annual Music Hack Day SF will be held on February 16 and 17 at Tokbox HQ in lovely San Francisco. Music Hack Day is a 24 hour hacking event where folks who are passionate about music and technology get together to build music stuff.
Photo by Thomas Bonte
The SF Music Hack Day is conveniently scheduled the weekend before the SF MusicTech Summit – where a 1,000 leaders at the convergence of music and tech will gather to “do business and discuss, in a proactive, conducive to dealmaking environment”.
Music hack days are fun. If you haven’t been to one and you in the bay area, sign up before all the seats are gone.
Music Hack Day Stockholm
This weekend I was in Stockholm, participating in, and representing The Echo Nest at the Stockholm Music Hack Day held at Spotify HQ. It was quite an impressive event. Hundreds of hackers from all over Sweden and many others from all around the world joined together for 24 hours of hard core music hacking. Spotify did an excellent job hosting the event. The space was ideal for hacking – rock solid wifi with lots of bandwidth, an endless supply of caffeinated beverages, comfortable seating, and great audio/visual facilities for demos.
(photos by johncb1973)
There were a whole lot of music tech companies there too, showing off their technology. Such as:
The Echo Nest
ShareMyPlaylists
Songkick
Open EMI
SoundCloud
Soundrop
Musixmatch
Deezer
Rdio
Gracenote
Universal Music
Musicmetric
Some hackers built their own musical instruments.
There were over 60 hacks demonstrated in a 3 hour period. Kudos to Andrew to keeping things moving along. There was very little demo fail – thanks to the good A/V and support from Andrew and his team.
While each team gave their demo, 100s of fellow hackers and guests watched, laughed, cried and celebrated the wonder of the music hacks.
There were all kinds of hacks: interactive games, music exploration and discovery, playlisting, remixing, sequencing. The hacks were incredibly creative, and despite the demo session being 3 hours long, the time just flew by. Be sure to check out the entire list of hacks.
We got to listen to much good music, from Oscar’s Flamenco guitar to creative remixing of the Blue Note Catalog.
I was quite pleased to see the number of hacks that took advantage of Echo Nest data to remix music. All of them were quite unique and clever uses of our API.
Stealing Feeling was one of my favorites of the Remix apps. They use the Echo Nest API to extract the rhythmic feeling of a song and used it to turn the output of a sterile drum machine beat into a living, breathing, human sounding rhythm.
My own demo was called Going Undercover. I used cover song data from SecondHandSongs to make music discovery playlists.
There were lots of Echo Nest based hacks. We originally planned to give out 2 prizes, but after seeing so many extremely high quality Echo Nest hacks we doubled the number of iPads we were giving out. The Echo Nest prize winners are:
The Sampler formerly known as Magnum Infinitity – TSFKAMI, is a musical instrument which creates patches from any sound or music you supply to it. Specify any directory with music or sounds on your hard drive and the contents will be uploaded to the EchoNest, which scans each file for short snippets with a pure(ish) pitch. The soundfiles are then chopped up and the desired snippets sorted by musical note and timbre and delivered to the sampler for that velvety smooth sounding goodness. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/the-sampler-formerly-known-as-magnum-infinity
Super Mutroid – A music/rhythm platform game with a Super Metroid theme. – Plays a song through Libspotify and downloads song data from EchoNest. Generates obstacles based on the beats in the song. – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/super-mutroid
Pimp My Radio – A physical standalone radio that connects to a WiFi network and plays music from Spotify based on your daily moments (wakeup, relax, work out, romance, party ). The radio has a knob control for setting the situation you want and also an lcd screen for showing the lyrics of the current song in sync with the time. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/pimp-my-radio
Stealing Feeling Based around a 16 step javascript sequencer which a user can program to run a drumkit generated in web audio, or to trig analog synths.Then, apply the swing from Aretha Franklin or Squarepusher on your song. https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/stealing-feeling
Other notable EN hacks
- Curadio – (another) physical radio with fancy playlists – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/curadio
- Shutupcloud – filters soundcloud playlists to remove spoken word tracks (using speechiness)- https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/shutupcloud
- Discofy–MHD – light show synced to beats – https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/discofy-mhd
- Orly – used Whosampled rostta stone to make an in-spotify who-sampled explorer (this is a really neat app) – https://github.com/circuitflow/orly
- Blue Note Beat Builder – winner of the Open EMI prize – really cool! – Find classic break beats and jazz samples from the Blue Note catalog and create your own beat, or try to re-create another famous beat from scratch. –https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks
- Dubthoven – remixing skrillex with strings https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/music-hack-day-stockholm-13/hacks/dubthoven
It was a fantastic weekend. Thanks to Andrew and the rest of the Spotify crew for hosting the event, and thanks to all the hackers who brought your passion for music and technology to the event and build some incredible stuff.
Special thanks to Johncb1973 who took most of these pictures.
The work of an Executive, International Music Hacker is never done. This weekend I’ll be traveling to Cannes for the Midem Music Hack Day. Life is good.
Boil The Frog
Posted by Paul in code, fun, Music, The Echo Nest on January 2, 2013
You know the old story – if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually heat the pot up, the frog won’t notice and will happily sit in the pot until the water boils and the frog is turned into frog soup. This story is at the core of my winter break programming project called Boil the Frog. Boil the Frog will take you from one music style to another gradually enough so that you may not notice the changes in music style. Just like the proverbial frog sitting in a pot of boiling water, with a Boil the Frog playlist, the Justin Bieber fan may find themselves listening to some extreme brutal death metal such as Cannibal Corpse or Deicide (the musical equivalent to sitting in a pot of boiling water).
To use Boil the Frog, you type in the names of any two artists you’ll be given a playlist that connects the two artists. Click on the first artist to start listening to the playlist. If you don’t like the route taken to connect two artists, you can make a new route by bypassing an offending artist. The app uses Rdio to play the music. If you are an Rdio subscriber, you’ll hear full tracks, if not you’ll hear a 30 second sample of the music.
You can create some fun playlists with this app such as:
- Miley Cyrus to Miles Davis
- Justin Bieber to Jimi Hendrix
- Patti Smith to the Smiths
- Elvis to Elvis
- The Carter Family to Rammstein
- Kanye West to Taylor Swift
- Cage the Elephant to John Cage
- Ryan Adams to Bryan Adams
- Righteous Brothers to Steven Wright
How does it work? To create this app, I use The Echo Nest artist similarity info to build an artist similarity graph of about 100,000 of the most popular artists. Each artist in the graph is connected to it’s most similar neighbors according to the Echo Nest artist similarity algorithm.
To create a new playlist between two artists, the graph is used to find the path that connects the two artists. The path isn’t necessarily the shortest path through the graph. Instead, priority is given to paths that travel through artists of similar popularity. If you start and end with popular artists, you are more likely to find a path that takes you though other popular artists, and if you start with a long-tail artist you will likely find a path through other long-tail artists. Without this popularity bias many routes between popular artists would venture into back alleys that no music fan should dare to tread.
Once the path of artists is found, we need to select the best songs for the playlist. To do this, we pick a well-known song for each artist that minimizes the difference in energy between this song, the previous song and the next song. Once we have selected the best songs, we build a playlist using Rdio’s nifty web api.
This is the second version of this app. I built the first version during a Spotify hack weekend. This was a Spotify app that would only run inside Spotify. I never released the app (the Spotify app approval process was a bit too daunting for my weekend effort), so I though I’d make a new version that runs on the web that anyone can use.
I enjoy using Boil the Frog to connect up artists that I like. I usually end up finding a few new artists that I like. For example, this Boil The Frog playlist connecting Deadmau5 and Explosions in the Sky is in excellent coding playlist.
Give Boil the Frog a try and if you make some interesting playlists let me know and I’ll add them to the Gallery.
Music Machinery 
